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MOTW 11/26/14: What we do is not simple murder.....it's triage

TexiKenTexiKen Dammit!That fish really got me!Registered User regular
New Avengers #27, Thor is a big John McClane fan who knows his way around that whole unworthy business, and we find out a lot of stuff about the Black Priests:
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After the traveling team kills a few Black Priests, they're stopped by their head honcho, who is.........Dr. Strange.

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Posts

  • Golden YakGolden Yak Burnished Bovine The sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered User regular
    I liked that revelation, and I also liked the coin toss of pure light and infinite darkness at the end.
    Although I think Ex Nihilo screws it up - if the results of both sides are pre-determined, you don't call a side - you just see which side lands.

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  • manjimanji Registered User regular
    man, that art is a step down from yu and walker. painful memories of the otherworld arc of UXF.

  • manjimanji Registered User regular
    edited November 2014
    well, my last post seems to have killed this thread stone dead. let's try and breathe a little life into it. whilst i always love the avengers scans this was a stellar week for me, especially from an art standpoint.

    gotham by night #1 starts strong:
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    and what is in that creepy shack in the swap their investigations lead them too...
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    transformers vs gi joe #4
    pet avengers!
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    bazooka eats cybertronian flora and goes on a vision quest
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    baltimore - the wolf and the apostle #2. the inquisition try to put down one of their number who has been cursed with lycanthropy for their relentless brutality and get wrecked for their troubles
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    2 straight issues of wolf-based ultraviolence. what's not to love!

    prophet - strikefile #2. there is a 2 page spread by The Rob which would burn your eyes out with it's beauty. enjoy instead the series' trademark european sci-fi weirdness
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    i do have a lot of love for sourcebook comics, shows a commitment to worldbuilding (and an indulgent publisher!)

    manji on
  • manwiththemachinegunmanwiththemachinegun METAL GEAR?! Registered User regular
    edited December 2014
    I hate it when supernatural enemies are robbed of supernatural weaknesses. So whenever some writer comes up with a situation where a monster gloats, "ha ha, your crosses don't work on me," and then they just stab them with it, I get a little faith back in the genre.

    Think how much better the Twilight movies would be for example if those sparkly Vampires couldn't cross running water. Hilarious.

    manwiththemachinegun on
  • durandal4532durandal4532 Registered User regular
    The literal only fun part of standard supernatural monster enemies is their complex web of vulnerabilities.

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  • manjimanji Registered User regular
    best vampire hilarity is in Rifts (the RPG) where vampires are so vulnerable to running water they can be killed by waterpistols and rain. oh, and by flashlights with crosses gaffer-taped over the beam!

    in Baltimore the riposte to that cross maneuver is a face-full of wolf claw, which is less fun for the poor inquisitor.

  • Centipede DamascusCentipede Damascus Registered User regular
    I kind of prefer the kind of vulnerability where running water and crosses just make them basically have panic attacks, rather than actually physically hurting or killing them.

  • WiseManTobesWiseManTobes Registered User regular
    manji wrote: »
    best vampire hilarity is in Rifts (the RPG) where vampires are so vulnerable to running water they can be killed by waterpistols and rain. oh, and by flashlights with crosses gaffer-taped over the beam!

    in Baltimore the riposte to that cross maneuver is a face-full of wolf claw, which is less fun for the poor inquisitor.

    I remember a Rifts campaign before any of the players knew about Rift Vampire differences to what we were used to, the GM knew, is why he had rivers and pools of water all over the place that we continually ignored until we all died.

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  • PhillisherePhillishere Registered User regular
    I kind of prefer the kind of vulnerability where running water and crosses just make them basically have panic attacks, rather than actually physically hurting or killing them.

    There's a great scene in the X-Files where Mulder beats a vampire by throwing a bunch of rice on the floor, because the lore says that if you do that the vampire has to count every grain of sand before they can move on.

  • Centipede DamascusCentipede Damascus Registered User regular
    Yeah, that's definitely one of my favorite classic vulnerabilities

    and if you think about it, it's a pretty funny connection to Sesame Street's Count

  • mattharvestmattharvest Registered User regular
    The best response to that, though, was in the otherwise abysmal Dracula 2000, where they juxtaposed that weakness against his super-speed: someone threw a vessel of grain at him, but the movie slowed down to show Dracula, in super-speed, counting each grain in the time it took the grain to fall to the ground.

  • Golden YakGolden Yak Burnished Bovine The sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered User regular
    The Discworld novel Carpe Jugulum has a family of vampires in it who have trained themselves to overcome traditional vampire weaknesses - going out on increasingly less cloudy days, diluted holy water in their blood, flashcards with holy symbols on them for the children - it works and eventually they're immune to everything, including the compulsive urge to look for missing socks.

    Count de Magpyr - "I misplaced a sock the other day, and I simply don't care. I have lots of socks. I can go buy more. More socks can be arranged!"

    He also makes a point of cheering on his family whenever their coach successfully crosses over a river, to the embarrassment of his kids.

    Funnily enough, one of the themes of the book is that Discworld vampires go to great lengths to ensure that its rather easy to kill them (one vampire has an extensive collection of holy waters from religions around the world in his cellar and keeps the big windows facing the rising sun nice and clean). Vampires die easily, but they can also come back to life easily (one drop of blood on the crumbled ashes and guess who's back?). As long as they're pretty easy to kill off temporarily, no one goes to the trouble to make sure they're killed permanently - it's a vampire survival tactic.

    It goes badly when a vampire's too clever to be dumb and thinks he can rule the world by cheating the rules...

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  • TheInspectorTheInspector Registered User regular
    Golden Yak wrote: »
    The Discworld novel Carpe Jugulum has a family of vampires in it who have trained themselves to overcome traditional vampire weaknesses - going out on increasingly less cloudy days, diluted holy water in their blood, flashcards with holy symbols on them for the children - it works and eventually they're immune to everything, including the compulsive urge to look for missing socks.

    Count de Magpyr - "I misplaced a sock the other day, and I simply don't care. I have lots of socks. I can go buy more. More socks can be arranged!"

    He also makes a point of cheering on his family whenever their coach successfully crosses over a river, to the embarrassment of his kids.

    Funnily enough, one of the themes of the book is that Discworld vampires go to great lengths to ensure that its rather easy to kill them (one vampire has an extensive collection of holy waters from religions around the world in his cellar and keeps the big windows facing the rising sun nice and clean). Vampires die easily, but they can also come back to life easily (one drop of blood on the crumbled ashes and guess who's back?). As long as they're pretty easy to kill off temporarily, no one goes to the trouble to make sure they're killed permanently - it's a vampire survival tactic.

    It goes badly when a vampire's too clever to be dumb and thinks he can rule the world by cheating the rules...
    What I liked was that holy symbols are just an arrangement of lines, and the vampyres (with a y!) are trained to know them all. So when the weaknesses start... coming back, they see holy symbols everywhere.

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  • Centipede DamascusCentipede Damascus Registered User regular
    The best response to that, though, was in the otherwise abysmal Dracula 2000, where they juxtaposed that weakness against his super-speed: someone threw a vessel of grain at him, but the movie slowed down to show Dracula, in super-speed, counting each grain in the time it took the grain to fall to the ground.

    Nah, I don't really like that. Just say that Dracula is so powerful that he has overcome a lot of the traditional vulnerabilities. "Fool! Your garden-variety vampire might fall for such a trick, but not Dracula!"

  • ZyrxilZyrxil Registered User regular
    edited December 2014
    I kind of prefer the kind of vulnerability where running water and crosses just make them basically have panic attacks, rather than actually physically hurting or killing them.

    There's a great scene in the X-Files where Mulder beats a vampire by throwing a bunch of rice on the floor, because the lore says that if you do that the vampire has to count every grain of sand before they can move on.

    It was sunflower seeds, gdamnit! And it was a fat ginger kid with plastic fangs!

    Zyrxil on
  • 143999143999 Tellin' ya not askin' ya, not pleadin' with yaRegistered User regular
    The best response to that, though, was in the otherwise abysmal Dracula 2000, where they juxtaposed that weakness against his super-speed: someone threw a vessel of grain at him, but the movie slowed down to show Dracula, in super-speed, counting each grain in the time it took the grain to fall to the ground.

    Nah, I don't really like that. Just say that Dracula is so powerful that he has overcome a lot of the traditional vulnerabilities. "Fool! Your garden-variety vampire might fall for such a trick, but not Dracula!"

    Even then, I prefer the idea that the vulnerabilities are still there, exactly as effective as they were before, only he has become so powerful that he can overcome them quickly enough to make them negligible. So he counts the grains at super speed, or he reads his opponent's mind back to when they grabbed the handful of rice and counts them within the memory, or he summons a horde of rats who eat all the rice, or maybe holy symbols hate being around him just as much as he hates being around them, so brandishing a cross only gets you a burning cross and a pissed-off Dracula, or....

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  • manwiththemachinegunmanwiththemachinegun METAL GEAR?! Registered User regular
    edited December 2014
    Or you know, he can't cross running water so the protagonists run him down and chop off his stupid head with a Bowie knife.

    Just sayin, invincible monsters are boring.

    manwiththemachinegun on
  • Bobby DerieBobby Derie Registered User regular
    Just sayin, invincible monsters are boring.
    Which is very true. The most interesting characters in comics tend to be the ones that are either very limited - and thus have to get lucky or clever - or are severely hampered or flawed in some way. Magneto, Doctor Doom, Thanos - these are interesting villains not because they're all-powerful, but because they're deeply flawed characters that for all their successes have very real limitations and flaws (even if said drawbacks tend to shift as the writers remember them). Hell, Galactus would be just another boring threat that eats planets except that he needs to eat planets or he'll die (and stretch that out a bit, if Galactus dies, Dire Cosmic Consequences ensue). Hell, some of the best Marvel superheroes are the ones that tend to lead sucky lives even when kicking ass and taking names - Spider-Man being the poster child for that, and Faction's run on Hawkeye, and most of the last three runs on Moon Knight - whereas the Reed Richards and Tony Starks of the world largely have lives so awesome that they're only brought down to earth on occasion by their massive hubris (or some other crippling personal flaw) rather than any real limitation.

    And I think that's why when you get into the more diverse aspects of comics, they do well to shift the tone a bit. Having Hawkeye and Thor on the same team (or Batman and Superman if you're a DC fan), that's a vast difference in power levels and abilities. It's hard to write a challenge that applies equally to both of them, so the dynamic usually focuses on multi-tiered threats and the power of teamwork and stuff like that. But in their own books, Thor can take on a mythic tone and fight gods and giants, and Hawkeye can fight criminals and spies and ninjas, and that works. But you need the distinction, otherwise every other book Superman has to deal with kryptonite or magic or red sun lasers or some other phlebotonium to negate/reduce his powers and keep from solving the whole conflict in a page. One of the great hallmarks of Morrison's run on All Star Superman was that he actually worked to create appropriate challenges for Superman, and I think that's part of why the series worked - and why it would not have worked, if it was a Justice League book facing the same threats.

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  • Centipede DamascusCentipede Damascus Registered User regular
    I'm not saying that Dracula should be able to stand outside on a clear day, but I think the more psychological weaknesses of his kind would be something he could overcome.

  • 143999143999 Tellin' ya not askin' ya, not pleadin' with yaRegistered User regular
    I mean, (one of) the whole point(s) of many of the modern takes on Dracula is the whole idea that to a being of sufficient will, limitations are things to be spat upon in disgust. They aren't there to stop him, they're there because an impotent, unjust God put them there in a vain attempt to stop him. So, mortality is a thing to be overcome, as are all the sub-limitations that spring up through an imperfect overcoming of that primary obstacle. Count grains of rice really fast. Outrace a river. Make God fear you so much that you repel holy icons more violently than they repel you. Whatever it takes, because if you can't, you weren't worth it anyway.

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  • ShadowhopeShadowhope Baa. Registered User regular
    I'm not saying that Dracula should be able to stand outside on a clear day, but I think the more psychological weaknesses of his kind would be something he could overcome.

    I think that Dracula should be able to wander around in direct sunlight.

    In the original book, he lost access to some of his powers in the day (shapeshifting for example), but he wasn't impaired by any human standards in sunlight.

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  • 143999143999 Tellin' ya not askin' ya, not pleadin' with yaRegistered User regular
    Eh, OG Dracula's atypical traits have largely been subsumed in vampiric lore since. If he "suddenly" started walking around during the day like it's nothing, people would accuse him of being sparkly.

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