Heh, I had to google that. It's pretty good, although inaccurate in this case as the first thing I did was award them a few points. However staggeringly bad their implementation, I cannot and will not deny that their design work is first-rate. Shit, I wouldn't care about any of this if their miserably abused protagonist wasn't one of my favorite characters of all time. I have to give them that much credit, however backhanded it may be made by circumstance.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Hmm. How to put this...

I'm no stranger to getting riled up and deeply pissed off when I think writers completely fuck up something important. I am a man who threw a sandwich at the television when he beat Mass Effect III. That's not hyperbole. I had a sandwich, and I was holding it in my hands when the moment dawned on me that, no, this was the actual ending, and I threw the goddamn thing. I maintain that the ending of Battlestar Galactica was so bad it actually made the previous seasons of an otherwise-sterling series worse retroactively, which is something of an amazing feat.

And I sometimes still clench my fists in white-hot rage when I think about the Air Temple Island getaway scene from Book 1, in which Lin re-creates her mothers greatest moment of triumph as a moment of supreme sacrifice in the name of a family she isn't even a part of... and has it undone offscreen in the next episode.

But I don't really regard any of those failures as moral ones. This isn't to say art can't fail on a moral level; it can! It does a lot! Even really good art can do so. John Ford made a ton of awesome films that have... problematic viewpoints with regards to women and non-white men. Comic books have been a big part of my life, and they're a genre that gave us the act of, and the term for, "fridging." And that's even before you bring up naked propaganda in the service of evil, like Birth of a Nation. (And yes, on a technical level I'd refer to Birth of a Nation as good art. In the narrowly technical sense. It broke ground in the then-new form of cinematography and people today still use many of the techniques and storytelling methods it pioneered.)

Your specific rage at Legend of Korra, Ben, and please forgive me if I've gotten this wrong, seems to take place on a moral plane in addition to a narrative one. It seems more than just you really not caring for the kind of story they are telling, or thinking it is a bad story, or at least badly told, but rather that it is a wrong story. That the underlying narrative has a message that is overwhelmingly awful and shouldn't be shown to people.

And on top of that (and, again, I might be wrong here) you seem to be taking it very personally. Your responses have often seemed to me to be those of somebody who views Korra as a real person, a friend of yours who is being abused and toyed with by cruel trickster deities who control her universe and have a personal grudge against her. And, well, she really isn't. Korra needs to be respected and treated well as a character, not a person. It's a different calculus, is what I'm saying.

I'm not going to tell you you hating the series makes you objectively wrong, although I am, being me, prepared to argue the relative merits of it in an effort to gain greater insight, but your opinions belong uniquely to you. But it seems to me that you're full of rage and bile for personal offenses that are... badly sourced, I wanna say?

I dunno. I'm used to strong differences of opinion, but Book 3 of Legend of Korra not only won me back after the train wreck that was Season 2, it seems to have won a lot of the fandom. That doesn't automatically make it good; the wisdom of crowds is deeply overrated. But you just have this visceral loathing of it that I struggle to understand, which weirds me out a bit because I'm used to clear statements of vision from you and the whole thing seems like a big muddle.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Obviously I can't speak for Gryphon, but believe I had a similar reaction to his from the game Beyond: Two Souls, and if so, it's not viewing the character as a real person, but instead, it's the perceived intent of the actions. At some point, the abuse goes from "character building" into sadism, literal "someone is deriving sick pleasure from putting the character through this" type sadism. It's just that most times, sadistic fantasy goes unnoticed, because the kind of people who write it, can't write well, and so we the audience don't establish a connection to the character. So it ends up like some of those awful splatter films where they make the victims so insipid and clueless that when the murderer shows up, we go "oh, thank you for chlorinating the gene pool".

The audience's irritation comes from the combination of an actually likable character, the repeated kicking when they're down, and lastly (as I've noticed from the TLOK discussions) the "marionette" factor-- because Korra is only a character, she's stuck in the clutches of the sadist, and can't ever apply the lessons a real person would take away from these situations, thus she will always climb feet-first into the woodchipper because she isn't given another choice.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

CAUTION: REALLY SWEARY (BUT NOT AT YOU)

Yes. This is closer than I've apparently managed to get, probably because I'm so disgusted by the whole thing that I can't look directly at it long enough to formulate a thesis more complex and time-consuming than, "Fuck that ending, fuck the people who wrote it, fuck the show it appeared on, and fuck me for caring this much. What a fucking chump I am."

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Not to me.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I... am legitimately curious as to how that works?

I mean, you can't treat your characters using the same moral calculus you'd use as if they were real people, can you? Because by that logic doing anything else other than making them happy at home is a monstrous crime.

If the good people of UF really existed, the things the production team has done to them would be heinous crimes. But they don't, which instead makes them really interesting stories.

-Merc
Keep Rat

There's only one major author I know of who writes characters just as characters, as roles to be filled, and that's Ayn Rand. And her writing is objectively terrible because of it.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

That's true, I suppose, but I would note that at this point in the series, Korra's track record is about the same as Aang's was at the equivalent point in time (in fact, it might be a little better; her confrontation with Unalaq and Vaatu was incoherent, but she did win) and Aang never really gave up and threw in the towel.

Korra isn't being written as trying to walk through a brick wall repeatedly and just not noticing that all these rectangular building things are in her way, is what I'm saying. She doesn't come off as dumb or idiotic at all. It's worth noting that I have a radically different interpretation of how the series treats Korra than Ben does, of course.

And in the context of this specific sub-thread, Ben was responding specifically to my point that the calculus for evaluating how actual people are treated is different than the calculus for evaluating how fictional people (characters) are treated. Hence, the direction I took the discussion in, as I was and am not understanding how to square the circle of his reply.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Actually, I have the same complaint about the (currently hot) comics writer, Jonathan Hickman. Thanks for helping me to crystallize my thoughts.

My father owns a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and a large number of T-shirts decorated with the company's logo. Many of the shirts also feature the slogan, If I have to explain, you wouldn't understand.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, you are under no obligation to edify me, of course, but I do have to say that I feel like either my intelligence or my moral compass has been insulted.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Hardly. Experience has shown me that we simply don't speak the same language as regards these matters, and I am tired of trying to translate my impressions into a dialect I don't speak. I fail, you think I'm just fucking with you when the truth is I Just Can't With This™, nothing is accomplished.

If my profane-but-concise new attempt at a summary in response 8 above doesn't do it for you, then I doubt I can ever do better than I did in my first post in this thread: "[The canon] revolts me and I am finished with it."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

To be fair: I can usually, I think, tell when you're fucking with me. What I'm awful at is telling when you're being tongue-in-cheek and when you are legitimately annoyed by my latest inanity. :)

This is not, by the way, something unique to you; it's a longstanding conversational quirk I seem to only demonstrate online, where tone can be difficult to pick up, and is something I do even with friends of over a decade sometimes. It also ties into my raging pedantry; nothing can kill the Grimace, etc.

I usually err on the side of seriousness, because I have found that you often annoy people if you think they were being serious when they weren't, but if you think someone was being tongue-in-cheek about something they take seriously, they seem to actually get mad. I dislike making people mad without a good reason.

>If my profane-but-concise new attempt at a summary in response 8 above
>doesn't do it for you, then I doubt I can ever do better than I did in
>my first post in this thread: "[The canon] revolts me and I am
>finished with it."

Oh, "the canon revolts me and I am finished with it" is something I totally get, or at least I think I do. I mean, god knows you are not obligated to like things. I've stopped reading people because their quality dropped off and it was like "well, this isn't what I signed on for anymore; I wish you luck in your future endeavors."

What's been having me scratching my head is that you go down an avenue of moral opprobrium I don't think is warranted for reasons I don't really understand.

I'm no stranger to deciding I am fucking done with a writer because their work revealed they were a terrible person and their work was equally terrible. Remember the Tom Clancy death thread? I didn't end my relationship with Clancy in the early oughts because he kept doing awful, terrible things to Jack Ryan's family; I ended it because Jack Ryan was running secret murder teams and this was portrayed, narratively, as a good thing that only traitors to America could possibly disagree with.

Piers Anthony, another good example. Around about the time I was sixteen I suddenly realized "Holy shit, this guy hates women. Like, all women. Everywhere."

But I put those guys in a different box than, say, I do Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who are just... not very good writers, who never fulfill their promise, and who don't take the craft seriously.

And it seems to me that Bryke haven't really done anything to warrant going in the box with Anthony and Clancy, but instead, if you really hate what they're doing, belong in the box with Orci and Kurtzman. You obviously feel otherwise, and for reasons I don't grok.

Put succinctly, it's the jump from "okay, I didn't really sign on to see Korra get banged up this way; you guys do your thing, I'll be over here" to "you are horrible people" that's got me a bit confused.

Having said all that, if you're uninterested in pursuing this further, I totally understand.

-Merc
Keep Rat

I'm not sure we're operating under the same definition of "moral" here, because I don't really know what the hell you're on about when you start with this. Your incomprehension is not comprehensible to me. Like I said, different dialects. It's getting pretty tiring, though, you're right about that.

At this point I'd rather just walk away and leave the thing to bleed out in the ditch. Every time I try to explain it again, I have to think about it again, and since my explanations never work, all that's doing is making me feel (as Richard Belzer once wrote about writing about J. Edgar Hoover) like I've been painted with someone else's sweat and then rolled in chiffon.

I hate the show because it pretends to be shiny fun adventure time (uncapitalized) and is really little more than a grim parade of ever-increasingly-awful things happening to a character whose only crime is being a hero in a world that can't have heroes. I hate it more because I love the character it's happening to. And I hate it most of all because of what an idiot it makes me feel like for caring that much. Some of that spills onto the people responsible, because shit doesn't happen in a vacuum. If that's Inexplicable Moral Opprobrium, fine, let it remain inexplicable.

There, I fucking thought about it again. Happy now?

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>I hate the show because it pretends to be shiny fun adventure time
>(uncapitalized) and is really little more than a grim parade of
>ever-increasingly-awful things happening to a character whose only
>crime is being a hero in a world that can't have heroes. I hate it
>more because I love the character it's happening to. And I hate it
>most of all because of what an idiot it makes me feel like for caring
>that much. Some of that spills onto the people responsible, because
>shit doesn't happen in a vacuum. If that's Inexplicable Moral
>Opprobrium, fine, let it remain inexplicable.

Actually? That makes perfect sense to me now.

I could argue with some of the points you raise (in particular the one about the show presenting falsely) but this is clearly a topic you're absolutely done with now, and it's not like there aren't a million people eager to talk about Korra. (These discussion are only fun and/or worthwhile if there's mutuality.) But hating the show because it isn't your thing, and feeling angry about it because of how it makes you feel vis-a-vis your own investment in the lead character? That's... something I'd have to be a real asshole to take issue with.

I was framing the discussion in moral terms I didn't understand because that was how I interpreted a lot of your comments on it. I was either doing it wrong or you were communicating poorly; probably the former. I was just left with the real strong impression that you were going after Bryke, not because you thought they were shitty writers, but because they were treating Korra in the same way Ron Marz treated Alexandra deWitt. Those sorts of lines of demarcation are things I have Views about.

But! You weren't. So that's on me.

And yeah, you're absolutely right that shit doesn't happen in a vacuum. My personal beef with the production team, outlined over in the thread, is that they're running Aang's playbook on Korra and it isn't working because Korra isn't Aang and because they're not disguising it the way they did with him. Her gender matters, too. Those are deeply problematic failures for me that I don't excuse in any way.

>There, I fucking thought about it again. Happy now?

Actually... kind of?

I understand more about how a person whose opinion I respect and whose work as an artist I consume approaches and interprets things than I did before the thread started.

That's a win in my book.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Well, that is one of the reasons I think they're shitty writers, but... yeah, I'm done here.

>>There, I fucking thought about it again. Happy now?
>
>Actually... kind of?

Well, then, I live to serve, I guess.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Or at least real ones that are over, and we know the makers didn't fuck up.

That said, I find myself oddly tempted to do a Galactipedia writeup for Fly Girls, complete with an episode list, which is a ridiculous thing to do since we've sort of established in the course of the discussion that it ran for at least six seasons. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Doing an episode list right would probably be more time than you wanna spend. I don't know about you, but I spent quite a lot of time last night hauling out old military history books and digging around on wikipedia in order to make really obscure jokes. And that was a labor of love, because you can never make too many jokes about Ploesti.

But man. Can you imagine trying to roughly contextualize the timeline of the Second World War with high school girls club rivalries and create wickedly humorous tongue-in-cheek episode titles with layered meanings? Like 150 of them?

I'm kind of tired just thinking about it.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Well... yes. Yes I can. Which is why I said it would be a ridiculous thing to do. :)

(Heck, I briefly imagined what the wiki would be like. Not the Galactipedia page, the subject-specific wiki, like the ones on Wikia for... everything. With pages for all the characters and flamewars on the Talk pages about obscure details thereabout. But that's a joke that doesn't really need telling, because all you have to do is say what I just said and people will picture it for themselves. :)

More realistically, I'd be tempted to get some of the characters designed and drawn, like I did with Hikari Sato, but I think every character-art commission I've got budgetary space for in the immediately foreseeable future is already earmarked. Which is kind of a shame, but that's life.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

It could potentially be interesting as a kind of collaborative work or piece of performance art; Candle Cove and the Elemenstor Saga are two examples of extensively curated wikis for media franchises that do not, strictly speaking, exist.

Because I'm sure what you need on your plate right now in addition to writing an enormous coffee-table book about a fictional moon shoot is another mammoth fan project, am I right?

>Although I notice, upon review, that even there you have a recurring "I'm sure
>you hated X because it has an unhappy ending and you're kind of a simpleton,
>but" theme going on.

I maintain that this was necessary in order to establish the proper sense of verisimilitude, because let's face it, you know that if Fly Girls was real, that is precisely where you and I would cleave in our appreciation of it.

I am committed even to my theoretical analysis of non-existent media in a role-playing thread, dammit! Because some people have standards. :)

-Merc
Keep Rat

True. Although at least, since it doesn't actually exist, the Fly Girls source would probably not suddenly jump up and pour its coffee on my campfire, causing me to lose all momentum and more than a little heart in the project with more than three-quarters of the base text written, a bunch of the illustrations done, and the school year about to begin. I'm... that just probably wouldn't happen.

>>Although I notice, upon review, that even there you have a recurring "I'm sure
>>you hated X because it has an unhappy ending and you're kind of a simpleton,
>>but" theme going on.
>
>I maintain that this was necessary in order to establish the proper
>sense of verisimilitude, because let's face it, you know that if
>Fly Girls was real, that is precisely where you and I
>would cleave in our appreciation of it.

Fine, but you could've at least ramped back a little on the "... and you're kind of a simpleton" part. I'm just saying.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Joking aside? I'm actually not entirely where you got that from, as it completely wasn't intended and even after going over that thread a couple times I can't quite see where you're getting the 'simpleton' part.

I'd never call you a simpleton, either openly or via implication. I have no qualms about calling you wrong should I feel the situation call for it, but not simple.

For anyone who might care about the thought process behind that particular post (which I should maybe put in the thread itself, but the Fly Girls thread is a thing of pure, unsullied beauty and I won't debase it by acknowledging within it that the show doesn't really exist) it more or less went like so:

"Hmm. Ben is right that the bombers in general would be kind of boring, but that's mostly going to be the big strategic bombers. The dive bombers and torpedo bombers would be interesting characters who lived compelling lives, so I can keep riffing on this theme using them. Oh, but most of the dive bombing in the west was done by multi-role ground-attack craft, and we've already talked about Stuka and Ilyusha and their brethren. That leaves the Pacific Theater. Oh, hey! The Americanized sobriquets for all the Japanese torpedo bombers are already girl names, that's perfect!

"... except the Val's and Kate's spent most of the war getting the absolute tar kicked out of them. And Dauntless, the American dive-bomber, was also kind of a joke. Avenger was a complete and total fucking badass... just in time for torpedo bombing to stop being a going concern less than a decade later. Okay, their story? It has to be a tragedy, then. That's great, I love me some tragedy. Ben kind of hates it, tho. That's also great! I can use that, since we've spent the past few months arguing about Korra and have a longstanding difference of opinion in this general area of discussion. It'll add some real verisimilitude to the post, like this is something we're legit arguing about. Okay, time to type this puppy up."

So that's how that went.

Frankly, I thought it more likely you'd get mad at me over my swipe at A-10. Instead you turned it into the most brilliant riposte in that entire thread. :)

Tangent: I have a complex relationship with the A-10. I think it's an extraordinary aircraft, an excellent example of what can happen when engineering goes right, and that it excels at many things. I also think that if it had ever actually been deployed for what it was intended to do, forward and close air support against a peer competitor (which in the context of when it was built, meant hunting Soviet tank columns as they roll through the Fulda Gap) it would have died in extreme numbers without doing much good. It's too big and slow if anyone can meaningfully contest the airspace it is trying to live in. The Air Force actually refused to send them against the Republican Guard anymore, back in '91, because they were afraid of them getting shot down; they used F-16s instead. And the Iraqi Army was hardly what you'd call a peer.

-Merc
Keep Rat

I dunno, there is a sort of inevitably implied pat-on-the-head effect in the recurring "but of course you don't like that kind of thing" theme. Like it's being sardonically belabored. "Ohhh, riiiiight, you're not into abusive plotlines. Bless."

>I also
>think that if it had ever actually been deployed for what it was
>intended to do, forward and close air support against a peer
>competitor (which in the context of when it was built, meant hunting
>Soviet tank columns as they roll through the Fulda Gap) it would have
>died in extreme numbers without doing much good. It's too big and
>slow if anyone can meaningfully contest the airspace it is trying to
>live in.

Well, sure. Close air support requires air superiority (which has to be achieved by other means). That's sort of a baseline doctrinal truth. You'd as well say that Kareem wouldn't have scored much without teammates who could make up for his lack of any ability or willingness to play defense. The only reasonable answer to that is to look slightly confused that it's even being brought up and say, "...Well, sure."

:)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Hmm. I guess I can see where you'd get that as sort of an overall theme rather than anything specific I have said in any one post. I suppose that's on me to sharpen my communications skills, then, as I didn't really mean to come off that way. It would be contemptuous in ways I wouldn't want to be towards someone who I didn't hold in open contempt.

At worst, I sometimes take issue with the way you characterize how certain things are executed. But that's not me rendering judgment on your lack of faculties or having a simplistic approach to art.

Believe you me, I am not shy about doing that openly, directly, and cuttingly if it comes up; there would be no sardonic implications. For example, without naming names, there is a past member of the production team here whose sense of political awareness I would be brutally savaging if they were still present and writing.

>Well, sure. Close air support requires air superiority (which
>has to be achieved by other means). That's sort of a baseline
>doctrinal truth.

Mmm, to an extent. It certainly cannot occur in an environment in which ones enemies possess air superiority. However, it can occur in contested air spaces. I would submit that the A-1 and the Il-2 were providing recognizable close air support, for example. And they could both operate in environments with hostile enemy aircraft in them and stiff ground defenses present in ways the A-10 simply cannot with an acceptable level of risk vs. reward.

It also depends on your definition of close; these days, largely because of the A-10, that tends includes certain expectations about the ability to loiter over the target and achieve precision hits that, in my opinion, are unrealistic for fixed-wing aircraft. Like expecting every offensive player to have Kareem's skills.

>You'd as well say that Kareem wouldn't have scored
>much without teammates who could make up for his lack of any ability
>or willingness to play defense. The only reasonable answer to that is
>to look slightly confused that it's even being brought up and say,
>"...Well, sure."

Straight up; I have talked with more than one person who is of the distressingly earnest opinion that the A-10 is basically immune to ground fire and that as long as there are no pesky MiG's, Sukhois, or Shenyangs flying around, it can go in and just kill everything in sight and fly away home laughing.

And that's just demonstrably not true. Trying to deploy A-10s against, say, a properly supported PLA tank formation, or even the Revolutionary Guards, is going to result in just a shit-ton of blown-up A-10s even if you have complete air superiority as well. They fly slow and low and they're awful big, and they'll eat a ton of ground fire that even their armor can't stop.

... this is making it sound like I'm really hating on the A-10. I am not. It is, by far, the finest gunship ever built. It kicks the shit out of attack helicopters in the gunship role, and that should embarrass the hell out of the guys who designed the Apache, since gunship work is sort of the sine qua non of attack helicopters. It's excellent for patrol work, and for operating in rough terrain where an F-16 or other fast-moving support craft might have trouble landing a precision strike.

And it fits the real-life tactical requirements of the armed forces very well; like it or not, we are likely to be fighting shitty guerrilla wars in faraway places for a long time to come, and the A-10 is just amazing at combating irregulars who don't have access to high-tech AA. You can't do an A-10 with an AK, after all.

I just think if we ever send them against a proper full-up enemy formation, we're going to be very, very sorry. This is part of why I'm so goddamn angry about the F-35, by the way; we need a modern fast-mover that can also provide a degree of close support, just like the F-16 is still doing and the Skyraider used to do. And right now we don't have that.

-Merc
Keep Rat

I really have to question this-- everything I've seen on the A-10 says it performed far above expectations in Desert Storm, and considering how much the Air Force brass wants rid of them, I would have expected to see the "they weren't even fit against Iraq, let alone a 'real' opponent" bit trotted out in the most recent appropriations fight.

Also, amusing bit with that "peer" notion-- part of the reason Iraq got stomped so hard during Desert Storm was coalition intelligence thought they were on-par with, if not the US, then certainly a top-tier client of the Soviets. The coalition amassed forces proportional to what they feared Iraq could do, and the reality . . . was a lot squishier.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

You sort of undercut your own point there, Nova, if I may. Just about everything preformed far above expectations in Desert Storm... because the expectations were low across the board. :)

People at the time had really dramatically underestimated how much of a difference technology and training could make. The US armed forces especially were still in a Vietnam mindset, where we got our asses kicked by a much more lightly equipped force of irregulars, and the Iraqis had... what was it, the fourth or fifth largest army in the world at the time? Battle-hardened due to ten years of fighting Iran, and we knew their equipment was good because a lot of it, we'd given them.

Only it turns out open battle is a lot different than fighting the jungle, and that a lot had changed with regard to technology and training between 1975 and 1991.

(I highly recommend David Halberstam's excellent War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals for some excellent discourse on how the US governments, and indeed international opinion, of the power of their armed forces underwent a radical sea change due to end of the Cold War and the stunning walkover Desert Storm turned out to be.)

But returning to the topic at-hand; the A-10s in Desert Storm did indeed preform very well, very well indeed... when they were going up Iraqi formations of lesser quality. But the Republican Guard formations, who actually were up to snuff and knew how to use their AA weapons and were loyal and motivated?

They kept the A-10s the hell away from those. They didn't lose many of them; those things are pretty damn tough. (Although there was one very bad day in February of '91 where they lost two on the same day.) But they got really chewed up; A-10s were coming back home with fist-sized holes in their armor plating and a lot of shook-up pilots.

The Air Force pulled back and wouldn't deploy them near the Republican Guard anymore. Fortunately, they didn't need to! They had F-16s.

As far as recent fights over it goes... the Air Force isn't nearly as hostile towards the A-10 as once they were. The top brass isn't as heavy on fighter jocks as once it was (although there are still way to many of them making policy, in my opinion) and they really do understand that someone is going to be filling the niche the A-10 currently occupies and if it isn't them, the Army might lobby strongly to get their own aircraft back. Supposedly, the F-35 is going to be doing the job, but that notion is increasingly farcical.

-Merc
Keep Rat

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Actually? I didn't see your post until after I'd composed my reply to Nova.

I think this thread is jacked, which is another good reason to bail out of it; it's had that weird duplicate post at the bottom for days, for example.

-Merc
Keep Rat

No, that was just me having an argument with cookie expiration the first time I tried to post that remark and not noticing that it had actually gone through the first time.

I mean, it is pretty jacked at this point, but not... you know... file corruption jacked.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, maybe it was on BBC or some other network with a spastic block on hitting an even season length with a claymore mine?

If you felt really ambitious it could have run on one of those Japanese networks that will only renew things in 13-episode blocks, rather than full 26-episode seasons.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

>Merc had nothing much to say about the first installment of TFLF, causing me to
>remark,

I was feeling obscurely guilty about this (which is messed up, but that's another thing) when I woke up around 5.00 AM and thought "Waiiiittt a minute." Not promising profundity, but still.

-Merc
Keep Rat

You would logically think so? But you would, for the most part, be wrong.

(Also, I think the bit of Bryan Konietzko's introduction where he talks about how hard the production process for Book 2 was is pretty ironic. "On a daily basis, for months on end, we just seemed to keep getting kicked while we were down." Well, now you know how your protagonist fucking feels, Bryan.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"A:TLA" was a semi-serious Historical Drama, commissioned during his middle-age, and primarily intending to show Aang as both the wise and powerful Avatar, and a flawed but basically good human, as well. It also took a secondary goal of humanizing and helping to reform the image of the Fire Kingdom.

"TLOK" was commissioned late in Korra's term, probably by someone whose parent or other important person was one of the villains she ended up kicking the crap out of. They specifically wanted a piece that would show Korra herself in the worst light possible, while still maintaining suitable respect for the office of the Avatar. (And suitably distancing themselves from the criminal activities of the villain in question.)

... yeah, it doesn't work all that well for me either. Far as I'm concerned, what you guys have written for UF -is- Korra's canon.

This sounds like a story best left to the K-On! doujinshi.

It's reviews like these that make me really want to avoid watching Korra at all. And that's a shame because her character seems to shine through your writing.

It's more than a little bit maddening to be this monumentally fond of a character who's so poorly treated by her canon that I can't bear to watch it - because where else am I ever going to see her? At least if it was a Japanese show, it would just be a really disappointing anime adaptation of an awesome manga.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Reminds me of the sentiment that Chuck (aka "SFDebris") expressed about Harry Kim, who seemed to spend the time when he wasn't treated a writer's chew toy being written so wooden you could drill a hole in him and let out the sap:

"I'm not above kicking a man when he's down but I do feel sorry when somebody keeps pushing him over first."

--------------------------
CdrMike, Renegade Time Lord

Always has been, always will be, so many writers don't get that, but hey, I treat that as Korra trying to find a positive in all that crap, and I don't really care because she got to be awesome, I'll take it as a win.

EDIT: Although I mentioned that to a friend of mine, and he commented that it's the difference between sympathy and empathy, which is fair enough, actually. I'm not sure it was needed for the story, but it's a fair point.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

More cod Buddhism from the RISD boys, I see.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

And not even particularly accurate Buddhism. The term that was traditionally translated as "suffereing", dukkha is usually rendered as "stress" or "frustration" these days.

But I digress. I'll let folks more steeped in Avatar lore rant further.

That was kind of meant to be implied, yes. :) I said "canned", but I meant something more akin to "cod", in its adjectival sense of "bogus, poorly imitative, clumsily fraudulent".

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.