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Comic

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  1. OTOH, it's a great tool to use to strip the body shields off a villain without hurting the hostages, so makes the AOE effectively selective fire when used that way. If it's a slot in an Ultra power, I'd still say it's worth -0 to make it KB Only, as the utility balances the limitation. If it's the only, or major attack power, sure, it's likely worth -2 on the advantage. And really, at 8D6, KB is a very unreliable tool.
  2. Absolutely, there's a big difference between Invulnerable to BODY, and Invulnerable to STUN. 60 PD, in a game with a 60 AP cap on attack powers, the BODY of the largest KA is still only 24, which takes only 12 points more to make resistant, for a total of 72. There's no "Energy Falling", but if there's a steel mill or volcano handy, or "Falling Into The Sun", then we need a reasonable Energy Defense for that. For the rarity of solar falling in most campaigns, I'd call it equal to the PD price. 144 AP, with a -1 Limitation, BODY Only, comes in around 72 AP, less when defenses that protect against STUN damage are subtracted. Can't disagree 75 AP to also ignore penetrating is fair. My bad. Carry on.
  3. Invulnerability: work out the cost of the DEF against the largest attack in the campaign, and call that the cost of Invulnerability to that type of attack. Your campaign is on a regular planet Earth, with 30D6 falling damage? 180 PD should cover it if you're not working against increased mass rules, at 180 AP; take a -2 limitation for Invulnerable to Falling Only (include falling-like damage such as being thrown, knockback damaged, or hit by a bus): total cost 60 AP for that type of Invulnerability. If you already have 30 PD, then it's only 50 AP to be Invulnerable to falls, KB and AE attacks that flatten you like you'd fallen at terminal velocity. Have that, and want it to apply to all Physical Damage? Biggest Physical KA in your campaign is 4D6? You can get 24 Resistant Defense for 12 AP. That should cover every non-penetrating, and almost every AP form of Physical damage for 192 points. Energy Invulnerability ought be far cheaper, at 120 ED and 24 Resistant Defense, a mere 132 AP. Paying only 75 points for over 324 points worth of effect? Seems too steep a discount, and by far. Even if you agree that statistically many of the points are wasted: at 30d6, you'll hardly ever get more than one standard deviation from average (about the same as max Stun from a 4D6 KA), so it's fair to ignore hardened or impenetrable advantages. Even the Stun Lotto effect on 4D6 KA is exceedingly rare, so some discount is plausible. And sure, a clever builder -- I'm looking at Hyperman here -- could stack appropriate Damage Neutralization dice in there to economize, but it's still well over 200 points worth as a power. I prefer Invulnerability to be limited to a special effect: Invulnerability to Fire for Daenerys Stormborn, for 44 AP, seems perfectly balanced to me. Hit her with lightning or a sword, she's toast; try to burn her and she doesn't even singe a little.
  4. The problem with the build is, at +1/4 to get the AE needed, any disadvantage would give you essentially an effect for free. It's a -0 Disadvantage. Just add +1/4 to the cost of the AE EB, and specify that anything outside the target hex takes only KB. If the goal is to make all the little things in adjacent hexes do extra damage by being thrown around, instead just build an explosion.
  5. I've always found the best cities for Champions had a waterfront. In the middle of the USA, that pretty much limits you to the Great Lakes. Chicago meets pretty much all of your requirements, but then again so does Milwaukee or Detroit, Buffalo (sort of) or the aptly named Erie. If you're willing to accept anywhere in the USA, then Miami and Galviston become candidates, as do Portland and Seattle, though New Orleans is far more storied. There's a whole New England and Eastern seaboard available, if you like, too. Halifax, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, if you're willing to travel outside the USA, could serve; plenty of places in Mexico and points south also work. Don't overlook Cuba. Isn't that one of the good things about the Champions system? Your setting could be anywhere, or a mix of all of the above. Or build a mythical Silver Age high speed rail system connecting the cities your heroes patrol, so you can cover all the range and variety without having to smudge the margins.
  6. I'm staying out of the whole telling people how to wear their hair thing. People can wear their hair however they like. Publishers can publish whatever art they like. There are no disadvantages to hair of whatever length or style so major that they amount to excuse for either disrespecting the woman or censoring the artist. Oh, and see what Ronda has to say about the advantages of fighting in ballroom dancing shoes.
  7. Say wut!? That's Earth 11 Superwoman, circa 2005, pretty much a decade before Lord Ingvald complained about all those long haired women. Shorter hair than her 1990's inverse. Different hair from most female comic characters. Go ahead. Tell her you don't like the way she wears her hair.
  8. Wouldn't they call it a surfaceable? And while it looks like the warrior _could_ mount that thing, unless his greaves lock into something on the underside, I don't see how he would stay on it at speed.
  9. Comic

    Reduced Mass

    The "Opposite of Density Increase" is a question that goes back as far as Champions. You can use the special effect for any number of powers, advantages or disadvantages: Desolidification, Gliding, Swimming Only To Surface, Reduced Endurance on Running or Swinging, semi-Intangible Clinging, semi-intangible Damage Neutralization or Damage Reduction, Susceptibility to Knockback, Invisibility to Hearing, Skill Levels with Stealth, Acrobatics or Climbing.. The list is endless.
  10. Sure beats Auralia itself developed independent consciousness, will and intelligence, sapping Takofanes of much of his knowledge and power to form a new and complex player in the saga, using its innate abilities to do something similar to Professor Paradigm's gauntlet, as much out of sense of self preservation as any other goal, to go into hiding in the last place anyone would think: in plain sight, in the shape of a newly powered superhero, deeply shielded from even the most powerful magical or technological probes to the point of being unaware that she is anything but what she appears to be, though drawn to Kilbern, perhaps thinking she sees him as a potential mentor in the heroing world.. Sorry. You guys do this stuff way better than me. I'll pipe down now.
  11. Thank you for speaking up on behalf of everyone who isn't me. Great to have that clarified. Sorry I missed the election where that vote took place. And while it's wonderful to apply goodwill readings to ambiguous writings, the ambiguity in Lord Ingvald's body shaming just is not there. It's body shaming. It's body shaming pointed at females. It may have all sorts of wonderful motivations, but it's delivered in a package more appropriate to the 1980's or earlier, the era of most of the offending images cited by Lord Ingvald, not 2014, by which time we'd already seen strong female voices in the comic book world speak for themselves with far more clarity, wit, and creativity. If you'd like to chat about the Hawkeye Project, and leave aside the by every measure substandard Lord Ingvald, by all means. That's a worthwhile topic, and no one is calling it body shaming or censorship. Because, unlike Ingvald, it isn't.
  12. Clearly, some of us are reading Lord Ingvald's words and depictions differently than others. I see censorship and body shaming of females in it on slim and easily shown false claims of logic, practicality and respect. Others don't. Fair enough. To me, censorship and body shaming are more important issues than turning comic books into instruction manuals for .. what? Good little girls, made of sugar and spice and all things nice? Jihadists? Inmates? What? The blunt hypocrisy and ignorance of Lord Ingvald's approach, given that the world got very much farther in such milestones as the Hawkeye Project (not all of which I agree with, but all of which I applaud) without censorship or redrawing female bodies to be more androgynous, is what initially rankled me. It's old. It's tired. It's heading off in the wrong direction. It brings down the valid and useful progress that has been made, without recognizing what advances have come, disputing images that in most cases are over a decade old and not relevant to the modern day and its issues. Short hair in the military historically follows headlice in the military, regardless of what lies their drill sargeants have whispered into the ears of draftees while tucking them into their bunks with warm milk and cookies to soothe their bruised vanity. It's hygiene, principally, not a form of self-defense to stop the enemy, whose principal modes of attack on the front lines are not grappling and throwing punches to the head. For every advantage of drawing the hair back or shortening it Lord Ingvald proposes, the restrictive and at the same time easily grabbed coveralls introduce a dozen disadvantages. Far from being more practical for real combatants, what Lord Ingvald proposes is less real-world practical overall. And not a few have commented on how crappy Lord Ingvald's drawings look. Much of this is for the same reason Power Girl's cleavage window exists in the first place: given the direction to remove all Superman-related insignia from the character in order to disambiguate her from Supergirl, and given no clear direction on a new insignia, the artist faced the problem of drawing a comic book character with no easy indication of body facing. Try it. Try drawing a human frame, male or female, with a blank chest, and expressing dynamic movement, power, speed and flight. Flash has a (some say phallic) lightning bolt on his chest to help out. Shazam has a (much larger some say phallic) lightning bolt. Superman has that S on the arrowhead pointing at his groin. Batman has the spiky bat silhouette which in no way resembles the actual bottom of an actual bat, also pointing the same way. Go ahead, plot the vector where those spikes meet. But that's all digression. Absent any image on a chest, absent the abdominal rack, a character is much more difficult to depict expressing POWER, as in Power Girl's first name. Abdominals and pectoral prominences are the historical, tried and true, ancient means artists have used for thousands of years, predating the Classic Smile, to get these points across and convey athleticism and strength, movement and dynamism. That's the practical consideration that is why Lord Ingvald, in avoiding these tropes, draws crappy representations. That's the logic driving artists. That they also deliver scandal and eye candy? Bonus, from their publishers' point of view.
  13. This entire thread springs from Lord Ingvald's decree that no female comic book character should ever have long hair. That's where hair came into the equation. Lord Ingvald's particular examples were Wonder Woman, Black Canary, Power Girl and Bat Girl -- four of the more ludicrous absurdities to make such a claim about. Go re-read the offending Lord Ingvaldism if you need to be reminded. It's somewhere between the body shaming about how women shouldn't dress that way and the body shaming about how women shouldn't have curves. While it's by no means technically wrong to point out that in the real world there are issues of practicality to do with hair length, plenty of female characters in comics don't wear their hair long so Lord Ingvald is opening a battle on a front that just doesn't reflect the actual state of comics, and it's a straw man to claim that we've somehow inverted Lord Ingvald's straw woman dictates by dictating the idiotic claims you're inferring with no basis that I implied that long hair is not much of a 'detriment' in a real fight: hair is exactly as much of a detriment in a real fight as having eyes, nose, ears, a throat and a mouth, a belt, a waistband, a jacket, a shirt, a jersey, fingers, a groin, and is certainly not as bad as a mask or headwear. Hair is less of as detriment than being outnumbered, on bad footing, injured, weaker, inexperienced, panicked, drugged, sliced up, concussed, partly bound by furniture or squeezed between doors or tables, surprised, or drunk. I have exactly an idea of how hard it is for scumbags to dig their fingers into openings in the skull of an aware and resisting person. Thanks for asking. You don't know what you're talking about, or are sticking to your point of view out of mere stubbornness informed only by watching the sort of organized event that wouldn't get it banned and its promoters arrested, or experiencing nice guy dojo etiquette. Everything about no holds barred fighting in the real world is hard, risky, wrong (usually intoxicated) and extremely stupid; I'd already conceded that hair pulling can and does happen and hair is somewhere (low) on the list of openings in street fights. No one's arguing that it can't or doesn't happen. Why are you still reacting as if anyone did, when we're clear on the point that comic books are not instruction manuals and do not represent the real world?
  14. So can we list the comic book characters with long hair who might actually be disadvantaged by it in a fight in some meaningful way? Black Canary - moderate length hair, voice that will make someone regret trying to grab her, even if they can overcome her DC-fu top rank martial artistry? Lobo - Long hair, about par with a Kryptonian in physical abilities. Sure, he's not a female. But we're talking about haircuts. Batgirl - that's a wig. Pull it, it comes loose in your hand. Wonder Woman - Vorpal Tiara. Medusa - her hair's alive, and likely stronger than you. SpiderGwen - moderately long hair, but somehow I think you'd regret it. Grab the hood instead. If you can get past her Gwen Sense. Bethany from Next Men - hair quite long, also razor sharp. Grabbing her hair costs you fingers. Thor, Loki, any Asgardian - long to very long hair. Odinson's not called "Goldilocks" for nothing. Don't see their hair hampering them much at all. Oh, hey, a lot of men among that lot. And they fight pretty often. Kitty Pryde - long hair.. Intangible. Phoenix - long hair in most incarnations.. half the power in the Universe. Scarlet Witch - long hair.. powerful enough to wish away 99% of all mutants on a whim.. thereby invoking the Phoenix to restore balance. Daisy Johnson - long hair.. trained in combat by Shield's most lethal agents, and can drop a mountain by looking at it the wrong way. You'd be better off going after Black Canary. She Hulk(s) - long hair, the harder you pull, the stronger she gets. Short haircuts in comic books do not represent pragmatism. They represent repression, done Lord Ingvald's way. And yes, it's true, if in the real world you happen to have an opponent by the head, using their hair to improve your grip is a lot cleaner and less likely to see the charges raised to aggravated battery than using their ears, nose, eye sockets or mouth for the same purpose by digging your fingers in and pushing harder. But then, it only takes a normal men's medium haircut worth of hair, or even a moderately trimmed beard or mustache, to achieve such a grip. On the whole, I'd rather offer a hank of hair than tempt a street fighter to try harder. Comic books are not instruction manuals. What people by and large think of as 'realism' in every generation is laughed at as naive at best by future generations that wise up once they see past the vanities of the prior generation. Lord Ingvald's "practical" designs? Nowhere close.
  15. Seriously, you think a helmet gives less of a handhold than long hair? You're calling Pics Or It Didn't Happen on some of the most famous people in MMA? Comics are not instruction manuals, how to guides, or compilations of images of real world people and situations. They are story books. Speaking of, the television story books about the blind swordsman, Zatoichi, depicted long-haired samurai much of the time, almost never with helmets. Sure, it's not a completely realistic depiction of how real life in feudal Japan actually went, but it's the creative framework for samurai storytelling that has gone over four decades without anyone complaining about its haircuts. On the whole, I will rely on the Zatoichi creative team as a guideline for samurai fictional haircuts over someone who is telling me about real fights, perhaps not aware that I worked as a doorman for five years and have seen more than a few real fights. Sure, hair pulling can happen, and hair can get in the way, but nothing compared to grabbing jackets (despite what the Batgirl artists say about her new jacket being 'practical'), belts, waistbands, shirt fronts, vests, buckles, and in the case of the extremely rare idiots who get into fights with hats, helmets or face-coverings of some sort, headwear is almost always a bad idea in a one-on-one confrontation where opponents have the time to seek openings and look for advantages. Hair is on the list of openings, sure, but it's way down near the bottom, far below eye gouging and throat punching. And if you're going to grab the hair of Black Canary, who can shatter bones with her voice rather than punch her in the throat, you've made a poor judgment call. For all we know, she's wearing extensions anyway, which in a fight can just come out in the attacker's hand, wasting their time. And again, how is Tony Stark's armor that can transform from a suitcase by changing shape and flying through the air to mesh with his nanosuit supposed to convince us that real world armor is more like comic book creative armor? Let's try to remember what the point is: comic book art is art, not reality; it depicts creative ideas, not the world as it is. Lord Ingvald's approach, in contrast to the usual art even Lord Ingvald produces, is wildly self-limiting to what is possible in the real world, if one is limited to prison wardrobe.
  16. It's as if we're looking at two different quotes, though we read the exact same words. Lord Ingvard wasn't writing in the mainstream media, or speaking to a polite crowd at some bookstore; the audience was the Internet, and on the Internet, incendiary words turn to flames in a microsecond. I stand by the accusation that this represents a call to, or threat of, violence against artists, given its context. It sure as heck can't be seen as a call to reasoned discourse or inclusivity. It's not, very "Can't we all get together?" .. by saying "..TRY to approach the subject of female superheroes with the degree of logic, equality, and respect they—and their readers—deserve," Lord Ingvard was saying "TRY to approach the subject of female superheroes with the degree of MY logic, MY level of equality, and MY level respect they—and their readers—deserve as I tell them it." Sure, the intentions seem wonderful. They seem great. But that conversation, it already started. It started years before the earliest comic book art. It happened during the production and sale of Wonder Woman, and of every comic book since, with portrayals of characters as diverse as Aunt May through Harley Quinn. It's not a new conversation, and Lord Ingvard acting as if it had never happened is either disingenuous or deceptive. The discussion has already started. Publishers are keenly aware of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexism_in_comics is not a perfect treatment of the subject, rife with strong opinion (as this topic is bound to become) and occasional lapses in objectivity (and with good reason -- actual sexism off the page at every level in comics is shameful, and ought be talked about and done something -- nonviolent -- effective about), but it goes a long way to balancing Lord Ingvard's naive new discovery of the topic on the page by presenting actual facts and history. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/humanrights/2015/02/02/comics-and-human-rights-a-change-is-gonna-come-women-in-the-superhero-genre/ is far better, I think, a treatment of the topic. "Traditionally, men in comics have been physically idealized, aspirational and empowered: a fantasy of what boys could become. Women in superhero comics are the other side of that fantasy. While men occupy the position of the ideal subject, women are not only idealized, but sexualized and objectified. If male characters are representative of what readers would like to be, the female characters are who they would like to be with; or, commonly, what they would like to possess. If the men possess extraordinary agency, women are receptors for that agency, waiting to be acted upon. Every difference between the traditional expressions of gender is heightened and refined. The relationships between superheroes operate within a fantasy space, following rules and conventions that accentuate the privilege of male characters and make their entitlement seem natural and inevitable." - Kate Leth Now, not a single one of those important actual issues is touched by de-idealizing the images of women, which is _ALL_ Lord Ingvald did by redrawing them in prison overalls with prison haircuts. Well, not all. We also see surgical nips and tucks of the offending anatomies, too. Which Gail Simone also talks about, under the general topic of fridging. And if you don't think she's white hot, Ferguson-style riot, mad about it, you haven't read her work. Are the two sides of the artist's pen connected? Clearly, but in ways Lord Ingvard's heavy hammer of coveralls and cut hair don't capture. As many female hands pick up pencils and draw as male, at age five; yet one in a dozen get their works published, ever, in the mainstream while Indie's and web comics are at par. That's overtly sexist on hard numbers. Nor are comic books alone among the fields of visual arts with the same historical and obvious biases. But when in history we see someone saying about art galleries what Lord Ingvard says about comic books -- I don't know why you're not so angry about it you haven't rioted, here's how those should look, and shame on the artists for doing otherwise -- we've seen terrible results that also do no good for balancing sexism, merely replacing it with oppression. If Lord Ingvard (and I don't know nor do I think it matters if Lord Ingvard is male or female) had wanted an inclusive discussion that moved the needle on this long ongoing dialogue, then maybe not going the whole get madder route -- like there isn't enough righteous outrage every time we talk about it in the wider world or here -- and maybe asking what people believe is logic, is equality, and is respect instead of imposing it might have worked better. Maybe reading some of the works of some of the women (and men) in the field who have written about this before over the decades and acknowledging how long a road the discussion has traveled before? Maybe not restarting us all at square one, and setting us back to the 1950's? Maybe starting us at the Hawkeye Project at least? http://io9.com/10-stupid-arguments-people-use-to-defend-comic-book-sex-1636381824 shows that this isn't the first time the same stupid things have been said (many of them sound just similar enough to things I've said to make me cringe) on one side or the other of the discussion, and it exactly hits Lord Ingvard's objections with humor, balance and insight. As suggestions, some of Lord Ingvard's drawings aren't so different from some of the drawings already out there.. by the publishers themselves, who very obviously have been listening long before Lord Ingvard heard of the issue. Tarring all their work with the same brush fails to recognize the distinctions that have mattered, and the changes that have been made. And it's just as authoritarian a tyranny as the boys' club ever saw, the way Lord Ingvard did it.
  17. I like the attitude expressed, the opinion, and the sensibilities. Which is why I think the statements of fact in places are simply wrong. If Lord FergusonStyleRiot hadn't been promoting violent solutions to the way women in comic books from fifteen or fifty years ago were drawn, but merely drew them in as disrespectful a way -- not crappy art, not drab, but outright disrespectful -- that to my mind would still be body shaming, and would still be offensive, but more to the point Lord ReduceTheSizeOfThoseNow was campaigning not for something, but against everything. There is no way Power Girl and Wonder Woman's costumes are offensive to sensibilities in the same way as Black Canary's or Bat Girl's, or Zatanna's. Yet the campaign caught them all in the same fishnet of prurience. This tells me the campaign isn't about protecting the targets of the attack, but about wanting to control what is presented in public. There's no way their hair is all 'combat inefficient' in the same way: Wonder Woman's headwear can severe the arm of a giant; her curls are in no peril of hair pulling. I know I've seen women MMA competitors with hair as long as or longer than many if not most comic book portrayal of female superheroes. These objections seem to me to be holdovers of unschooled prejudice and mythology of martial nonsense: if you're worried about someone grabbing and pulling hair in battle, then all those extra hand holds you're giving them with bulky jackets and armor and belts and waistbands is a dozen times worse. Power Girl is Kryptonian; she moves at the speed of light natively, and every strand of her hair is tough enough to slice through an I-beam. So how plausible is this "makes practical sense" argument? Since when have comic books been how-to manuals for actual combatants? I'm sensitive to the feelings of outrage, to the shifts in the market, and to business savvy and business sense. I'm just saying, if there's a big pile of censorship sitting in the middle of the room, someone should open the windows and remind people what fresh air smells like.
  18. With Dr. Megaton's stats, being caught inside his own 12d6 punch isn't going to do Body, ever. If he keeps the punch to 7d6, it's unlikely to do him Knockdown, but it's still a really useful way to get a lot of normals suddenly Unconscious, and leave them seriously injured.. It won't Stun Dr. Megaton; except in exceedingly high rolls it won't take him more than a single post-12 Recovery to get back everything that exceeded his defenses. And if he's being ganged up on, then doing 12d6 to all his attackers and himself is going to hurt him a heck of a lot less than doing nothing and letting a half dozen attackers all do their worst to him. So, I wouldn't have paid the +1/4 "Explosion with Hole" advantage to avoid the minor annoyance of a little feedback from this power. And as a GM, there's no way I'd have allowed Personal Immunity to a punch (because Immune to Punch is Desolidification), so "Explosion With Hole" would be what it would take.
  19. Would that be the spandex CG suit? Iron Man's suit in the movies moves more like fabric than metal. In the latest comics, it's nanothreads packed into his bones, or some such. What can be done in comic books, as works of speculative fiction including magic and advanced technology, and psionics and miracles and mutations is beyond what we have done yet in our world, by the very nature of speculative fiction. So fishnet armor is a work of imagination, not an impracticality. Amazon tube top armor is a creative statement, not fan service. Well, okay, it's both. So what? As if the red briefs over spandex on Kal El isn't? And what about Leonidas in 300? Is he impractical, or not a warrior? If we can accept a Tony Stark in nanofibrous assemblage as Iron Man, why not armor forged by Hephaestus himself that works at least as well? The long hair thing is situational. Go ahead, reach out your hand, and open your fingers, to grasp the queue of a samurai. It'll make counting easier for you. You'll only be able to get up to five afterwards, but did you really know what to do with ten before, if you're dumb enough to match bare flesh against sharp steel? In real street fights, it's seldom what a person's wearing or their haircut that makes the difference. They aren't even in the top ten. And Black Canary is primarily a street-level super.
  20. I've had some success with a similar concept built with Variable Advantage and Variable Special Effects, again with limitations on what triggers the change and no control over type of change. A Force Field, Flight, and EB with these advantages can be more economical for the high point powers than a huge VPP, and also means you can make sure the Life Support VPP is small enough to avoid the abuses some adapters I've seen have argued for.
  21. "Took him two years to get into that shape." Cosplay. The key to health and fitness.
  22. .. which gets us to the distinction between criticism and censorship: http://comicsalliance.com/ask-chris-batman-year-two/ This review tears DC down and takes it to task for such a ludicrous storyline, in every way imaginable, but it does not accompany that valid critique with calls for riot, nor does it preach on the morality of presenting Batman wearing a gun as being so bad for society it has to be stopped: it just points out the elements that in the opinion of the reviewer are out of character to the detriment of the storytelling. Every reviewer is entitled to their opinion. No reviewer is entitled to threaten violence against artists to limit their creativity. That's the Charlie Hebdo line, distinguishing Lord GunsGoodBrasBad from a peddler of soft censorship and into real concern.
  23. Ignore it. Superheroes don't interfere in ordinary commerce, and villains are too vain to be seen eating junk food in public while wearing spandex.. Or possibly the other way around.
  24. I see no reason for you to be sorry for your participation, able defense of your views, and substantive arguments; they've improved the discussion and provided balance. Sure, if Lord Can'tStandBrightColors had been part of the creative teams, it would not have been censorship to offer costume changes. Costume changes by creative teams happen all the time. If Lord ThoseCurvesAreTooBig had just been a fan creating a fantasy version out of mere creative expression, that would be fair use. But Lord JihadOnDC also called for violence, and went to considerable effort to assert that the creative teams were doing wrong in a way that should be shut down, and Lord Here'sHowYouMustDress ought be the person to determine what those creative teams can and can't draw. That's censorship. It's not state censorship, sure. But almost all state censorship starts with public censoriousness, with censorship by religious or moral or political institutions, and those start with individual calls, individual framings, of views of what ought be allowed. If we wait for censorship to rise to the institutional or state level before we agree that it's censorship, before we realize what's going on, what's being taken from us all, then we've waited too long and put too much of our freedom in too great peril. Comic is most definitely not arguing that Lord LookAwayEvilBodyPartsWillCorruptYou is imposing draconian laws against women. Draconian laws against women already exist, in almost the entire world, and have for far too much of history. We're just so used to them, we hardly notice that they're there, and that they've been there. We simply don't react when someone says something that, were the shoe on the other foot, would be considered offensive or absurd. Suppose someone called for Batman to be obliged to carry a gun. There are open carry states, this isn't outside the realm of possibility. There are people who don't know that a core Batman character element is that he's psychotically opposed to guns, having witnessed the senseless shooting death of his parents as an impressionable young boy. There are people who know it, but don't think it matters. There are people who scoff that it's silly. This isn't a political stance, or a moral stance: Batman hates guns, always has, and always should, just as Superman is weakened crazed depowered unaffected by Kryptonite, and the Green Lantern is vulnerable to wood yellow light weakened will... The difference is, those changes in characters were internally brought about by their creative teams, not by someone outside demanding it and applying threats to make it come about. Lord BodyPartsAreIcky's shaming of women for having too much of what they have, for flaunting it too much to tolerate, that's awful enough in and of itself. You let go instances of people doing that, it sinks into the background and people start thinking that it's acceptable to view bodies as shameful and people as wrong for liking how they look or liking being different. But that's just part of it, and yes, it's integral to those draconian laws against women that exist in far too much of the world, and have either on the books or implicit in cultural norms for far too long. See, the name I go by is Comic, not Fairness. I'm not really the right champion for all women everywhere, as Lord WomenShouldDressAsISay imagines they are. I'm just defending comics from censorship, and that's what this is. If you're with me, that's great. If you're not, I can respect that. Different people have different sensitivities to perils and risks, and different views on logical consequences.
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