Silver/Bronze age post-modern apologetics

[Ninja-Bear]

3 hours ago, assault said:

Also, be aware of your ideological assumptions.

 

Humanity is diverse, and their motivations can't be derived from a particular dogma. It doesn't depend on what that dogma is.

 

You can't do it with Marxism. You can't do it with Christianity. (Which Christianity?) And you certainly can't do it with Libertarianism.

Humans may be diverse but the needs are the same. They just try to deal with it differently.

[phoenix240]

The ease of penetrating Secret IDs is one of those aspects of comics that often overstated, IME. 

[massey]

11 hours ago, Steve said:

One of the ideas that caught my attention in Mr. Allston’s Strike Force setting was the Governor, a being artificially holding back the progress of technology despite all the super-geniuses and their weird inventions. It could be that something or someone behind the scenes is influencing the world so it takes on the appearance of the Silver/Bronze Age.

 

It could be that the world is like the Matrix, a controlled reality of some kind. There is danger and problems that requires superhumans, but the world seems to function within certain predefined parameters. Or maybe mankind somehow imposed it upon itself, a consensual reality like in White Wolf’s Mage: The Ascension.

 

Who or what is controlling reality? Why do they want it to be like the Silver Age/Bronze Age? How are they able to get people all over the world to accept this reality? What happens to those who figure out the truth?

 

And what happens if everybody wakes up?

 

It's a bit too meta for my preferences.  I know it's an odd thing to quibble about, given that this is entirely a meta discussion.  I'm hoping more for it to be the natural outcome of the actions of the people within the setting.  There's no "truth" to figure out, because everything is exactly as you see it.  There's not an Iron Age "reality" out there and you're having the wool pulled over your eyes.

 

Not that there's anything wrong with that kind of setting, it's just not exactly what I was aiming for.

[massey]

6 hours ago, assault said:

My overall opinion: the results you would get depend on the assumptions you make.

 

There's no objective "this would happen".

 

Decide on the results you want, and set your assumptions accordingly.

 

Lex Luthor is US President, and Tony Stark is funding the Democrats...

 

Well, yeah.  And I'm wondering what kind of assumptions we can make to get us to the end goal.

 

 

So, let's talk villains.  You need a steady stream of one-shot losers who will appear, get beaten up, and never seen again.  The Silver Age had a tremendous amount of weird themed villains who would show up a couple of times, but aren't on anybody's all time list.  Who can forget Egghead, Crazy Quilt, Kite-Man, or Polka Dot Man?  How can we justify guys like this?

 

Obviously mental illness works differently in comics than it does in real life.  In real life, a crazy guy stops showering, screams at his hallucinations, and becomes completely paranoid. It's tragic and doesn't make for fun stories at all.  In the comics, mental illnesses lead you to becoming obsessed with random objects, like unicycles or something.  Human physical potential also appears to be higher in comics than in real life, so some crazy obsessed guy can practice a lot and now he's the Unicycle Cowboy, riding on his chosen method of transportation and tying people up with a lasso.  Villains like this can work because most police are reluctant to shoot the crazy guy, and even if they do try, he's got that obsessive drive that makes you more dangerous than you should be.  He's surprisingly hard to hit for a 3 OCV cop.  These villains will promptly try to challenge the local superhero.  When they inevitably get captured, a justice system that hasn't had to deal with the worst effects of real life crime, puts them in a mental institution.

 

 

[Cassandra]

1 hour ago, massey said:

 

Well, yeah.  And I'm wondering what kind of assumptions we can make to get us to the end goal.

 

 

So, let's talk villains.  You need a steady stream of one-shot losers who will appear, get beaten up, and never seen again.  The Silver Age had a tremendous amount of weird themed villains who would show up a couple of times, but aren't on anybody's all time list.  Who can forget Egghead, Crazy Quilt, Kite-Man, or Polka Dot Man?  How can we justify guys like this?

 

Obviously mental illness works differently in comics than it does in real life.  In real life, a crazy guy stops showering, screams at his hallucinations, and becomes completely paranoid. It's tragic and doesn't make for fun stories at all.  In the comics, mental illnesses lead you to becoming obsessed with random objects, like unicycles or something.  Human physical potential also appears to be higher in comics than in real life, so some crazy obsessed guy can practice a lot and now he's the Unicycle Cowboy, riding on his chosen method of transportation and tying people up with a lasso.  Villains like this can work because most police are reluctant to shoot the crazy guy, and even if they do try, he's got that obsessive drive that makes you more dangerous than you should be.  He's surprisingly hard to hit for a 3 OCV cop.  These villains will promptly try to challenge the local superhero.  When they inevitably get captured, a justice system that hasn't had to deal with the worst effects of real life crime, puts them in a mental institution.

 

 

 

Batman: The Brave and the Bold remembered them.

[Steve]

2 hours ago, massey said:

 

It's a bit too meta for my preferences.  I know it's an odd thing to quibble about, given that this is entirely a meta discussion.  I'm hoping more for it to be the natural outcome of the actions of the people within the setting.  There's no "truth" to figure out, because everything is exactly as you see it.  There's not an Iron Age "reality" out there and you're having the wool pulled over your eyes.

 

Not that there's anything wrong with that kind of setting, it's just not exactly what I was aiming for.

 

It doesn't necessarily have to be an evil plot. Whoever or whatever is modifying things could be entirely benevolent.

 

Perhaps having superpowers and not imposing something like this leads to a dystopian nightmare in the future.

 

If learning the truth leads to a worse world, do you still awaken people?

[assault]

4 hours ago, massey said:

In the comics, mental illnesses lead you to becoming obsessed with random objects, like unicycles or something.

 

This pattern of obsession might be a product of the subtle differences between the Silver Age society and ours. This might be similar to how eating disorders manifest in advanced industrial economies versus others.

 

Or maybe it's a side effect of a common medication. (But that's too dark.)

 

Or perhaps there's a genetic component, possibly related to increased physical potential. "The Bat Gene". The variant, potentially disordered cognition that results from it might be sufficiently offset by the physical benefits for it to survive within the population. (And Batman is a mutant, but we ignore that. )

 

I could see both social and genetic factors in play. (Nature and nurture.) The "Bat Gene" probably isn't uniformly distributed on a global scale - it might have originated in North America - meaning that the majority of the resulting crazies, including "crimefighters", might be located there. The social factors shape their obsessions, and tend to push them into playing the social roles of supervillain or hero.

[Cassandra]

52 minutes ago, assault said:

 

This pattern of obsession might be a product of the subtle differences between the Silver Age society and ours. This might be similar to how eating disorders manifest in advanced industrial economies versus others.

 

Or maybe it's a side effect of a common medication. (But that's too dark.)

 

Or perhaps there's a genetic component, possibly related to increased physical potential. "The Bat Gene". The variant, potentially disordered cognition that results from it might be sufficiently offset by the physical benefits for it to survive within the population. (And Batman is a mutant, but we ignore that. )

 

I could see both social and genetic factors in play. (Nature and nurture.) The "Bat Gene" probably isn't uniformly distributed on a global scale - it might have originated in North America - meaning that the majority of the resulting crazies, including "crimefighters", might be located there. The social factors shape their obsessions, and tend to push them into playing the social roles of supervillain or hero.

 

Obsession for a super villain makes them commit crimes with a theme, allowing a hero with deduction to correctly guess where they will hit next.

[Cancer]

"It took years and cost a fortune.  Luckily I had both."

[assault]

Malign Hypercognition Syndrome ("Mad Scientist Syndrome") is probably related.

 

One of the side effects of this syndrome is that even relatively benevolent sufferers have difficult turning their inventions to more broadly useful purposes. They might invent a flying car, but are likely to then stick it in the shed and move onto something else rather than commercialize it.

 

Naturally, they are terrible at keeping notes, so anyone seeking to reproduce their work has to essentially reverse engineer it from scratch.

[assault]

A darker option: Science sends you mad.

 

The down side of the more advanced science of the Silver Age world is where it came from...

 

The 1950s crackdown (the Comics Code, in our world) wasn't without cause.

 

If you look too deeply into science, it all gets a bit "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fthagn!".

[Steve]

38 minutes ago, assault said:

A darker option: Science sends you mad.

 

The down side of the more advanced science of the Silver Age world is where it came from...

 

The 1950s crackdown (the Comics Code, in our world) wasn't without cause.

 

If you look too deeply into science, it all gets a bit "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fthagn!".

 

Sounds like Genius: The Transgression.

[megaplayboy]

The main golden and silver age trope I can think of: Heroes don't kill or do so with extreme rarity, and villains rarely kill large numbers of civilians, rarely kill the DNPCs of heroes, and even more rarely kill the heroes themselves.  Why?  My theory is a combination of a kind of gentlemen's agreement that "this is how the game will be played...or else", and a sense of Mutual Assured Destruction(murderous vigilante heroes leads to ever more ruthless villains, and vice versa).  One could also add the possible public opprobrium of heroes playing judge, jury and executioner and perceiving super-murderous villains as "too dangerous to let live".  The public would demand a military response to a villain who wiped out a town, and perhaps a nuclear response to one who wiped out a city(or small country).  

[assault]

I'd leave Golden Age out of that, but I will have to think about the Silver Age situation.

 

Theoretically there could be something else happening.

 

Obviously a lot depends on the particular villain.

[Ninja-Bear]

On 2/28/2018 at 8:43 PM, assault said:

Malign Hypercognition Syndrome ("Mad Scientist Syndrome") is probably related.

 

One of the side effects of this syndrome is that even relatively benevolent sufferers have difficult turning their inventions to more broadly useful purposes. They might invent a flying car, but are likely to then stick it in the shed and move onto something else rather than commercialize it.

 

Naturally, they are terrible at keeping notes, so anyone seeking to reproduce their work has to essentially reverse engineer it from scratch.

Look at some of Da Vinci’s work. He was lightyears ahead of everyone else and no one really could understand some of his inventions. I think some brave soul in the last 5 yrs or so tried his parachute. Iirc Da Vinci’s parachute used wood in its structure so modern people were very reluctant to try it. Btw it works.

 

I can see super tech in a Silver Age  be something like magic in that the theories needed may not be very well understood and even other mad scientists don’t necessarily understand each other works. And add to it rare materials or components like Mechassasin complication would limit production in a hurry. Irl when gunpowder was a secret formula, guns weren’t very accessible.

[Lucius]

On ‎2‎/‎28‎/‎2018 at 8:26 AM, RDU Neil said:

 

 

Every decision we make (however flawed by bad data, or corrupted by our particular irrationalities) is a cost/benefit analysis... is it worth it?... and that is economics.

 

If everything is economics, the word "economics" is virtually meaningless. It refers to nothing specific if it refers to everything in general.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says that's my two cents worth

[Matt the Bruins]

On 2/27/2018 at 8:47 AM, massey said:

One of the criticisms I've heard of older comic books is that nobody could maintain a secret identity.  With as many cameras as we have today (everywhere) and facial recognition software, you'd think that by the end of his first day in Metropolis, Clark Kent would be getting e-mails from hundreds of spambots where the advertisers had already figured out he was Superman.  clarkkent@hotmail.com would be flooded with "Superman, do you need ways to make you penis bigger?  Order now!"

[dmjalund]

in john byrnes run of superman, he uses superspeed to vibrate his face (like flash sometimes does in his tv series)

[Cassandra]

12 hours ago, dmjalund said:

in john byrnes run of superman, he uses superspeed to vibrate his face (like flash sometimes does in his tv series)

 

In the 1987 short lived TV show Once A Hero a comic book superhero comes to the real world and meets his creator.  Later his girlfriend arrives and when asked why the glasses he wore fooled her she revealed that she always knew and was just humoring him.

[massey]

I figured that with Clark and Lois specifically, it was part of their constant flirting.  Loads of sexual tension there.  Like it probably fooled her for a while, but the more she got to know Clark/Superman, she'd eventually put two and two together.

[Matt the Bruins]

I actually think having Lois in on the secret from the moment they met is one thing the DCEU got right. Her intelligence and investigative ability aren't portrayed in a bad light, and they're able to have a solid, honest relationship right from the start with none of the creepy aspects of the dual identity stories.

[starblaze]

It was pointed by Batman that Superman is hiding in plain sight.  Because he doesn't wear a mask and everyone knew that he was an alien from Krypton it was assumed that he was Superman all the time.

[steriaca]

6 hours ago, starblaze said:

It was pointed by Batman that Superman is hiding in plain sight.  Because he doesn't wear a mask and everyone knew that he was an alien from Krypton it was assumed that he was Superman all the time.

Luthor once deduced that Superman was Clark Kent, then dismissed his own findings via the logic of why someone as powerful as Superman not be Superman 24/7.

[starblaze]

He couldn't understand why he would humble himself to pretend to be human among all of humanity. But then humility is not Luthor's strong suit.

[Ninja-Bear]

3 hours ago, starblaze said:

He couldn't understand why he would humble himself to pretend to be human among all of humanity. But then humility is not Luthor's strong suit.

Humanity in general has a hard idea of anyone being so powerful would be so humble. Hmmm where have I heard that before?