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Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

From the same author and artist I can recommend Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt: Watch, a short but deeply layered unauthorized thematic sequel to Watchmen that examines how that work subsequently warped the storytelling conventions of the superhero genre as a whole, often in ways that run counter to the ideas that Watchmen was actually trying to advance.

There's also a strong chance that you'd like Gillen's various runs on X-Men, touching as it does on similar ethical and political themes; I've only read the stints he did when the X-Men were still based out of San Francisco, as opposed to the Krakoa era stuff that by his own admission most directly shaped The Power Fantasy. But recognizably power-fantasy-shaped ideas were in there even then.

Gillen's Young Avengers is a fun little romp that also visibly contained the storytelling kernals of the Masumi/Isabella relationship, in the sense of asking the question of whether people with reality warping powersets can ever be truly sure that they've got the consent of their partners (in that case they can.) I don't think it's totally incoherent to think of TPF as what happens when the never-trust-anyone-over-30 libertine young gun superheroes wake up one day and realize they're all pushing 50 and it didn't work.

Depending on your tolerance for gore, bleak realpolitik, and how enjoyable you find mashing figures from WW2 together like action figures, you might enjoy Uber, which I didn't read enough of to form a formal assessment of but which I did enjoy the six or so issues I did read of it. It's permanently incomplete due to a rights dustup, which is why I stopped before I ran the risk of getting too invested.

not only is the slaughterhouse nine the arc where the worm really takes a nose dive in quality.

I used to believe this was the Chicago Weaver stuff but I feel that it has more redeeming qualities upon my reread.

but the worst part is that it removes everything about the slaughterhouse nine that made them feel interesting as villains.

the slaughterhouse nine arc had all these interesting interpersonal dynamics where we got to see these characters play off their weaknesses. We got to strategies where you saw Taylor and piggot making all these plans to keep things under control. it felt like a arc of hunter x hunter

And now all these interesting characters are reduced to a bunch of zombies to kill. heck I'd say echidna was a much better evil clone arc because we got curve balls in the worm of cauldron being revealed, trickster turning on the heroes, radiation death, witness (yes I still say she's cannon)

the only truly relevant slaughterhouse nine members are bonesaw jack slash and grey boy and even then I think only bonesaw got a decent amount of development.

I feel a lot of this is the changing of scope beyond city level where the strength of worm was in developing it's teitary cast of characters.

and then it just ends with Jack asking scion to give being evil a try with his talk no justo and he scion goes along because he's a golden moron.

we don't get to see one last display of his manipulation from him

The concept is that the slaughterhouse nine is now a horde. But how do you execute that concept and what will that add to your story

For example could you have had a lot of the character drama of the og slaughterhouse arc play out in 9 thousand.

if you have these aspects can then why are they absent. if you can't have it then what conceptual appeal is going to act as a replacement. Yes 9 thousand has greater scope and spectacle but these things are not as compelling as what was lost.

whether that's a question of wildbow being able to better write character drama and strategy than spectacle/ scope or if these are inherent strengths of the medium is beyond me though.

As for Jack talking Zion, I feel it's less a matter of can he do it or not and more a matter this plot beat just happening seemingly randomly without any build up. When the story could've been written in a way that would've made jack earn his pyrhic victory against humanity.

and yes jack is being "carried" by the influence of his shard. But if he didn't have any manipulation skills his shard would've chosen someone else. Yes the point of his character is that he isn't smart as he thinks he is. But that doesn't mean he has zero manipulative prowess and that it wouldn't be interesting to see one last display of it.

But ot of these progression fantasies and lit rpgs. Are built from an extremely male mindset, and surprisingly enough I view this as a bad thing. Because they feed into a self improvement bro gamer solipsism, embodied by stuff line crypto and sports gambling.

it's hard to imagine a character becoming more feminine when they are embodying a journey defined by becoming a aggressive hyper individualist thug.