It is strange how your 'own problems' seem to always be the biggest or most pressing, irrespective of scale. I've been lurking as opposed to participating recently because "my own problems are more pressing". I'm far from a hero, but I deal with crime, homelessness and illnesses on a frequent basis. Nor am I an emergency services or medical professional. I am still surprised by some of the things I see and hear after 18 months of this lifestyle, but I have certainly heard a huge number of pathetic excuses from people who don't want to make or follow-through on 'hard' decisions.
> From: "Michael Demcio otterknight_at_yahoo.com [SkunkworksAMA]" <SkunkworksAMA_at_yahoogroups.com>
>I'm with you on that one, Mark. To show a society as more civilized is certainly more complex for a >writer than to show one less civilized...
>
As you point out - more complex. Can a society be simplified? What compromises will have to be made? Are they for the long-term greater good? Survival of the fittest (no, not Des Lee's parody!) would suggest many 'hard' decisions can be made possibly for the betterment of the species going forward.
>While I can understand the poster's viewpoint in getting a bit tired of the same heroes and villians fighting each other over and over again since the heroes are seemingly too "weak" to kill, beyond the fact that the publisher wants to keep these enjoyable characters alive for future readers
to enjoy if they have not discovered them which is the real reason for the revolving door of battles and characters coming back from the dead if they are killed...
>
Always ask the question "why are they telling me that?" News reports are a classic - are they _really_ trying to inform you, or just 'shock value', or 'make you feel good that you're not that stupid' or similar? Is it just advertising in another form to mould your opinions? In the case of Marvel and the like, they are trying to sell cartoons, hence keeping a 'tried and true formula' that continues to sell cartoons.
>To simply have heroes kill villains as some think they should, would in all reality "cheapen" the character.
>
Though westerns are still popular because the 'dark hero' has the guts to 'pull the trigger'; they take the falls, make the calls and carry on.
> These are icons and legends who give us something to aspire to, a bigger picture than sometimes falls outside the realm of what we would consider as "logical behavior" at the time. Simply put, its too easy to simply say "Okay, there's someone making trouble here. Let me waste them and get rid of the problem." While this viewpoint can be entertained through characters such as the Punisher or Deadpool through either a humorous or deadpan writing style, again to say that a hero is weak for not taking this viewpoint is unfair.
>
We like to believe there is good in everyone, and to some extent there always is. No one (ok, there is probably someone somewhere...) is 'pure evil' where they injure everything they see or touch. Everyone means something to someone. One of the firearms forums was talking about restraint in using your gun - if you shoot someone and kill them, you have killed someone's son, daughter, father, mother, brother, sister, friend, etceteras. And you will have to live with that. And they (others) will remember that you did it too.
There was a famous murder case in my local area that occurred about 20 years ago; one of the people who 'took revenge' on the (at that time) alleged killer by throwing a severed pig's head through the front window of the killer's house has "lived to regret it". He is frequently shunned by society, can't get a job (his reputation largely kills that) and since his parents passed away recently is now homeless as no one wants to rent a place to him. And he wasn't even the guy who murdered the child, just the guy who threw a pig's head through a window...
Jim, keeping taking care of yourself and see if you can get at least one of the books compiled - may as well leaving a lasting mark of some kind! And it is the different stories that make us consider and maybe thing differently.
Scrapper, Black Dragon, what would I know? O_o
Received on Tue Jul 08 2014 - 16:33:26 CDT