Here's the situation. Someone asks a good question about a specific rule interpretation. User 1 responds with an answer along the following lines:
The rules on page [x] establish this as a case of [thing], which means it must follow the rules on page [y]. Contrast with case [other thing] whic...
I have been asked a question! "Do the comic-book Lovelace and Babbage have any superpowers?" Answer: Yes! They can, at will, summon dazzling statistics with which to devastate their opponents.
The Doctor Who Christmas special aired yesterday, marking the last story with Steven Moffat as show producer.
Moffat's first professional writing job for Doctor Who was a late 90s comedy skit for charity called "The Curse of Fatal Death," and his six years as show runner feel like he's been going down the checklist of things he wrote in "Curse" and making some version of them happen in the show proper.
The one constant about Doctor Who is that it changes (though I doubt New Who will ever be allowed to change as much or as quickly as, say, Series Six to Series Seven of Old Who did). Audiences evolve, and the show's resilience and adaptability is a key factor in its longevity and success. Regeneration itself was made up out of thin air to dodge an unexpected casting problem so the show could survive beyond its original premise!
Personally I'm still not settled with the notion that sometimes the Doctor's okay with macking on humans.
yeah not every Doctor is equal. Some are amazing coughstombakermattsmithcough and some could be forgotten forever coughcolinbakercough but this is one of the few things that have always remained constant is that he's a male. I'm going to give her a chance don't get me wrong, it's just a very weird feeling.
Troughton defined every Doctor after him in ways that Hartnell never did, as the benevolent Machiavellian cosmic hobo. Pertwee was the first action hero Doctor. McGann was the first sexually romantic Doctor. Eccleston was the first non-Southern Doctor. Tennant was the most human, and the first manic pixie dream girl.
And, well. If it's a matter of continuity then we've known since Four that Time Lords weren't restricted to species when they regenerate, and since Eleven that they weren't restricted to gender.
And behind the scenes the actors, writers, and creators have been pushing for a woman in the role since the early 80s.
And in terms of themes, well. It's always been a show about crossing boundaries, challenging tradition for its own sake, being comfortable with oneself whoever one turns out to be, exploring new ways of being, and confronting the show's real-world contemporary culture.
So, yeah. I totally get the change being weird and unsettling for a lot of people, but I think that's good! The show hasn't taken a lot of risks recently, and it's been very comfortable. That complacency, to me, is not something Doctor Who can retain and still be the Doctor Who I love to groan at.
It should be a show that never says "no" to a ridiculous idea because it might be unpopular. Five minutes of underwater fishman ballet to yawn-worthy instrumentals is the admission price for "NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN STOP ME NOW!"
And Jodie's gonna be brilliant. She's probably one of the safest choices they could've made.
I just hope they give her consistently good material.
Her casting has been massively empowering for a vast swathe of audience that spent fifty years seeing themselves represented as the sidekick, and for me personally it's given me hope that the show will start taking risks and being okay to maybe fail sometimes again.
@Miniman The special was surprisingly good! It was very Moffatty, but in ways that I'd've been quite okay with if I hadn't already spent six years of the same.
Well, mostly okay with.
The story and its themes gave a nice coda to his era, and Moffat kept his need to smear his greasy fingerprints across all the show's history to a minimum given it's his last opportunity to do so.
And there was none of the active sabotaging of his successors like RTD's whinging about "I don't want to go!" and "I'm going to die and the man who walks away won't be me!"
Obviously Whittaker didn't get much screen time, but I think she sold me on the new Doctor faster than any other actor ever has.
@BESW This is one front where Doctor Who has been amazing. Many of the companions haven't been sidekicks, more like partners. Hell Troughton had one who was frankly his superior. Granted we haven't seen a lot of this recently. Rose and Amy are the closest to partner the show has had, but they were still kept down just enough to make it clear who the real hero was.
@Miatog Individually, yeah, there've been a lot of great female characters. But the "Doctor Who girl" isn't baseless if you look at the show's history overall. That misses the point, though: it's massively important for kids to see a show about the limitlessness of imagination and the significance of humanity in all its forms, putting its money where its mouth is.
Adults can often be mollified with "but there's lots of Strong Female Side Characters" logics, but kids don't forget whose name is on the credits and what that means in terms of permission to be the hero.
Sarah Jane Smith was introduced as the plucky feminist who wouldn't take Three's patronizing condescension. Sladen quit because the role had devolved into twisting her ankle, getting kidnapped, and screaming.
@BESW I dunno. My favorite childhood characters were hobbits and rangers and jedi and wizards and mythical kings and etc. Not really bookish Russian kids. Not anyone I could grow up to be in any capacity. And yet.
@Magician The plural of personal experience is, happily, not universal experience.
It's pretty easy to find plenty of both anecdotes and studies showing that representation in media has strong influence on a significant number of kids' vision of their potential roles in both stories and in society, to have an impact on the trends of that generation's adult vectors.
@Magician I don't think this is a comparable experience to a young girl seeing only male leads.
Imagine being a kid and every book was about heroic hobbits doing cool things. Every TV show about hobbits. Every time you go see a film, it's about hobbits with a single human sidekick at best.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, for example, credits the crab in The Little Mermaid for showing him that someone like him could be a professional in musical theater.
(Which is, he admits, all kinds of wrong on several levels. But that tiny amount of troublesome representation helped give him the impetus to become someone who could push for better representation and hopefully inspire someone else in turn.)
@BESW That's kind of my point. We emphasize with characters regardless of their gender, ethnicity, biology. We can be inspired by crabs or aspire to be as brave as Wonder Woman AND as smart as the Doctor.
@kviiri In the world where only fantasy or sci fi people are heroes, I'm stuck in my mundane reality.
@Magician ...the crab was the first time Lin-Manuel encountered someone singing in musical theater with a Carribbean accent, like his own.
@Magician We've had these discussions before. I don't doubt your experience, but neither do I doubt the many other kinds of experiences I've seen shared and studied which are unlike both yours and mine. It seems like you're trying to say that because you didn't value or miss a particular experience, it's not an important experience to give others.
@kviiri I have to totally disagree. I have never looked at any hero ever and said "That's me!" or "I identify with that character!" and yet I still love so many of them. I'll never match any of them in any way but the most superficial of matching my gender.
@kviiri Sure, though I cared mostly about fantasy. Regardless, most of them that I saw were Western, one way or another. John McClain might as well be an elf to a Russian kid.
People are standing up and saying "This representation is important to me" and "My perspective of [genre] shifted dramatically when I finally saw someone like me in a central role in one of its stories" and "Seeing someone who shared a trait with me that I consider definitional or limiting doing a thing showed me I could do it too, even though I'd seen other people less like me do it a lot before."
I believe them. I've been them, albeit in smaller ways because a lot of my identity is portrayed regularly despite the fact that a lot of people who share those representative qualities consider me exotic and unlike them.
I just can't wrap my head around how any of that matters. Wonder Woman was a role model to me growing up. So was Spiderman. Shari Lewis was a huge part of growing up. Rescue Rangers told me a lot about being in a team. Gender, race, height, I just don't get how any of that effects you being a role model to some people.
@BESW And that's great. Whatever gets people inspired, great. More diversity in our media, fantastic. Don't mistake my doubting the necessity of representation for me being against it in any way. However. How many of those people are children whose minds got blown, and how many are adults who were (self)taught they weren't supposed to be inspired by characters unlike themselves?
Isn't it a self-fulfilling prophecy, to divide characters (and people) into Us and Them, using whatever criteria, and then not see yourself in these characters?
@Miatog That's fine. We don't have to completely understand every experience in order to believe it's important to the people who have it and support them in what they say is important to them.
@Magician Children are very good at pattern matching, they will pick up the "heroes are male" trope quickly without anyone teaching it to them if they see it often enough.
@Magician (a) I've mentioned or linked several examples of children having these experiences already. (b) Adults don't arrive at conclusions like that on their own, it's part of the social environment that can easily get into your head. (c) Don't succumb to false dichotomies about either identifying or not, or false extremes of "like me" or "not like me." It's a nuanced, complex, personal thing.
@kviiri Again, though, that's just one pattern. None of the books I've read were about Russian kids. Russian people are mostly villains in the Western media. I don't feel bereft. Naturally, I'm just me, and others probably do.
People who aren't commonly represented by our stories have spent their entire lives being learning to identify with people unlike themselves. That's very different from having role models who share more traits with them, for many many reasons including how the people around them see those people.
@Magician I think you have an honestly good point, though - the world would be better if everyone, including children, could think and act in a colorblind, genderblind manner and consider everyone, including fictional characters, by their individual traits and merits.
Just remembered another series I loved as a kid. Well, barely remembered. It was kid detectives, but maybe not Nancy Drew. Definitely a girl, though. In a small European (?) town, in the 50s or so. Basically an elf. Wanted to be as smart as her.
@kviiri I actually disagree there; I think the world would be better if we found commonality in our humanity without needing to ignore or change our differences--but instead celebrated our diversities and found strength in cooperation and learning from each other.
Cultural and individual diversity is super important to a functioning civilization.
We've all got different experiences and different perspectives and different strengths, and that's awesome.
@BESW I think that's what kviiri meant: individual differences matter, and they're treated as individual, not seen as parts of larger patterns of gender or ethnicity.
Yeah, that's what I tried to communicate. Although cultural differences, gender differences etc are cool, they shouldn't be constraints to what one can be, become or be treated as.
I think it was the "*blind" phrasing that raised a flag for me. Context matters, and injustice can disguise itself as righteousness if we ignore a person's context for the sake of "equality."
"It's only a coincidence that Tyler (the sole black character) happens to die before the halfway point of the film. Like in every other film. You would understand this if you focused on the character and not just his skin color." or somesuch can only be taken seriously for so many times.
@Magician Perhaps one of the stumbling blocks here is that "empathize" is not really what I've been talking about--there's a difference between "I can empathize with that person with a quality society values which I don't have" and "I can see myself in the role occupied by that person who has a quality society values which I don't have."
@BESW I could see myself in Nancy Drew(?), as much as I could see myself in Aragorn. Neither had much in common with me. Being male is a part of my identity, sure, but so is being Russian, and geeky, and so many other things. Nancy Drew was somewhat geeky, but neither male nor Russian. Aragorn was male, but neither geeky nor Russian. The Doctor is alien, genius, British. Not much in common.
One of my linked examples is children writing stories about superheroes, and --across a wide sample, although it's still anecdotal-- universally assuming the hero will be male. That's not the girls being unable to empathize with a male hero. It's both boys and girls not thinking a girl would be a hero.
Similarly there's a number of Wonder Woman stories about parents seeing their little girls suddenly feeling like they have "permission" to be superheroes, when the parents didn't know that was an issue at all for them.
@Magician Again, I believe you. Other people have different experiences, and I'm sharing those experiences which are unlike your own.
Since you seem to be conflating empathy with role models in the subject of representation, I'm offering examples that might help clarify where I'm coming from.
I haven't been bringing much personal perspective so I'll bring some of my own: as a kid, I tried to write fiction about a Finnish boy of my age. It was hard because every similar story I had read was either about an American kid, an English kid or a fantasy realm kid. So I kinda get the Western audience part. I just felt weird even trying to make fantasy work here.
In my early teens, I got a lot of strength from MacGyver's many reruns because it reminded me that a male hero can be both wholesome and awesome.
(A common justification for not depicting marginalized people in mainstream media is that "the audience won't identity with them," which is utter poppycock since marginalized people have been successfully watching and identifying with straight white guys for generations. That doesn't change the fact that blacksploitation happened because there was a thirst to see yourself on the screen too.)
@kviiri I remember the first time I read a novel that mentioned a plant I'd grown up with. It was A Big Deal to little BESW. All those kids I'd been reading about who lived in wood houses with sidewalks and fences, and took the bus to go to the store? That was exotic for me.
I still laughed and cried with them, but something resonated very deeply when I first read about someone standing next to the bougainvillea. And it wasn't about the character, it was about me. My place in the world shifted irrevocably.
@BESW There's some amount of selection bias here. My Girl Was Inspired By Wonder Woman is a story, and the kind you'd be interested in. Feminism! Representation! My Girl Was Inspired By Gandalf, is, well, not. But, again, I do not doubt this happens. I do not begrudge the kids being inspired. I distrust adults not to do the "nuanced, personal, complex" harm with good intentions.
That's why my friend cried at Moana when she saw taro on the big screen for the first time ever: the ground had moved underneath her. A real, personal part of her life was now shared with people around the world. She was, just a little bit, less unknown, less exotic, less unthinkable.
Yesterday, we watched Big Game (wikipedia), where a Finnish boy helps the US President (played by Samuel L. Jackson!) survive the wilderness of Northern Finland. Probably would've rocked my world as a kid. (though it's way too mountainous to actually be filmed in Finland, that's for sure)
But you can fix it by using \ to tell the chat that whatever character comes next is not markdown: \[[wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Game_(2014_film))\] becomes [wikipedia]
Strange how it's always the US president who winds up in trouble abroad in films, eh? I don't think I've ever seen a film or a video game where the driving force of the plot was any other head of state being in immediate danger of death.
"Jackie Chan! The Minority Whip from the British House of Parliament has been kidnapped and you're the only man in Hong Kong who can save him!"
I would watch that.
Bonus points if Maggie Cheung is his co-star.
@kviiri I had a friend who watched the ending of Matilda a dozen times in a row because they have a throw-away joke with Guam as the punchline.
(There's a small subset of children's films that use "Guam" as the punchline for a joke about somewhere very far away. It's kind of a weird recurring thing.)
Thunderbirds Are Go recently mentioned one of our nearby islands, but mispronounced it.
@BESW We were playing this abysmally hard online puzzle that awards a Geocache when completed... it's a graph of words, connected if two concepts are somehow related. The player basically has to guess words based on the number of letters in the word and the things it's related to. Well, we had opened the words for "department store" and "Moscow", and they were related to a three-letter word. "It's GUM, I knew
and that was related to something with four letters.
That turned out to be Guam, because GUM is Guam's country code. :)
Last night I had a weird dream: a dragon arrived, was killing villagers, and apparently it was RPG Stack Exchange. I was trying to figure out whether I was allowed to suspend them for poor behaviour when I woke up.
(Now that I'm awake, it's clear enough that killing villagers is a pretty significant violation of Be Nice, but that wasn't so clear for dream-me.)
I noticed that the system flags some questions as being 'On hold' when we vote to close it and others are flagged as 'closed'. Are there differences between each label?
I'm thinking several of these changes were to help in catering to the Sci-fi themes more, such as having someone be able to take a hit or two and shrug it off in the next scene.
I would think it's an action genre theme. Star Trek had plenty of situations where someone got decked and the conflict was around "with Geordi out of commission, who can fibulate the fibulator?"
Yeah, but that's because Worf is an action focused character
Of course, then you get to truly interesting sci-fi like the Culture books, where it's fairly trivial to regrow obliterated limbs, or even thaw a backup clone
I am always on the lookout for games where dying and losing are decoupled, I'd like to see more done with that sort of thing
I vaguely recall a game of 2E AD&D where we managed to can a portion of troll flesh. It was the emergency ration. Open container, let it regrow a bit out of the can, slice, cook, serve. Pungent, but kept you alive. Of course the dwarf thought it was a brilliant idea at the time...
I do wish it were a larger sample than just DC and Marvel. I'd be interested to see how other imprints do. (I doubt it's great, but it'd be nice to see who's doing better.)
@Yuuki I guess one could expand the scope to include the Franco-Belgian BD scene and the Asian comics scenes. It could perhaps provide interesting insights.
@kviiri The issue becomes which comics/genres to analyze? Comparing all manga to DC/Marvel is inherently unfair given that manga is a medium not a genre. DC/Marvel deal pretty much wholly with superhero comics.
From a very "naive" point of view, I would classify the characters of Asterix and Lucky Luke as superheroes, but they're still of a rather different genre.
The other problem of mismatch between manga and DC/Marvel though is that DC/Marvel have very long-running, multi-creator series which tend to do well in exposing general systemic trends. Whereas manga tend to be captained by a single author. To my knowledge, there is no manga series that has been passed down from one author to another, let alone one that's changed authors repeatedly.
Do they? I guess it's hard to tell when the four people in this image are all supposed to be high school students, and the guy on the far left is much older
And at the same time, these people, minus the teacher, are also high schoolers
Er, not 4 and 1, 3 and 2 - the one in white is supposed to be much older than even the one on the far left
So when Japanese protagonists claim that they are 12 you can't really take that at face value
Plus about half of them are secretly 1000 years old or something, whereas immortals in Western comics tend to at least look like adults
Manga might also be more representative of same-sex relationships than DC/Marvel, but that's a result of their different view on homosexuality. It occasionally comes through in Japanese games.
The best way to put it would be that, in Japanese culture, homosexuality is something you experience but are expected to grow out of. Like it's a phase kids go through.
So as a result, some people have this false conception that Japanese culture is more tolerant of homosexuality, to which I reply with "kinda, but to an extent and with a massive caveat".
@Yuuki i'm guessing it's because markdown is written with an ethos that it makes sense in plaintext as well -- it imitates formatting we use when we don't have any formatting available. strikethrough doesn't exist in such an approach.
@SPavel It sounds like a re-skin of the d20 Star Wars wounds/vitality mechanic, which is intended to make combat more "cinematic." I'm on the record that I think it actually makes combat less cinematic in practice.
Because attacks don't go through Vitality to hit wounds at dramatic moments: they go through because one side has firepower superior to the enemy's defences, or because the dice rolled a critical, or something similar.
Speaking as someone who's tanked three hits in a row without any damage and suddenly being brought to single digit health by a crit, it doesn't really feel cinematic the other way either.
@BESW Hey, thanks for taking the time & patience to explain stuff to that new user a day or two ago after they were frustrated at having their stuff edited.
Still reading through the book. Some parts are explained better than how PF did. Some parts are d20 sludge kept for what I can only assume is tradition sake and product familiarity.
All weapons in Starfinder are crit x2. Some simply have an extra effect on crit. No more x3 or x4s.
Though energy weapons get to some fireball level damage rolls.
The concept of having a Race/Theme/Class instead of just Race/Class is kinda neat.
Themes seem to be flavored features that kick in at 1st, 6th, 12th, 18th.
@Yuuki Jughead, Blob, the Hulk, some versions of The Flash, Orange Lanterns, Asterix, Thor, Hellboy, Deadpool, Supergirl, at least one version of Etta Candy, Galactus (obviously), Venom, Scooby-Doo, Unicron, Starfire, Cyborg...
@BESW I feel like some of those are less "they eat comical amounts of food as a superpower" and more "they eat comical amounts of as a common visual gag in the medium".
Namely Starfire and Cyborg and Saturday morning cartoons.
Here's the situation. Someone asks a good question about a specific rule interpretation. User 1 responds with an answer along the following lines:
The rules on page [x] establish this as a case of [thing], which means it must follow the rules on page [y]. Contrast with case [other thing] whic...
I noticed that the system flags some questions as being 'On hold' when we vote to close it and others are flagged as 'closed'. Are there differences between each label?
