Though at least Hammond was treated with the contempt he deserved.
Nacarbac [any]
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 28th, 2023
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3·3 days agoVarious spoilers.
Yeah, it’s pretty silly. His backstory was probably near or at Epic level
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if he genuinely thought he could fuck around with Karsus’ Folly - that’s one of the few things that would have your peer superwizards (who mostly dislike each other) joining forces to put a stop to.
I think pretty much all the character’s backgrounds were a poor choice on their part. You don’t need a shred of backstory upfront if the writing is up to snuff, and having theirs be so high-level kinda makes everything happening pretty low stakes - the intro cinematic with the spelljammer vs dragonriders is basically a level 20 action sequence, and then you’re slogging through mud and goblins hearing about how cool everyone else used to be, having just seen how cool the stuff you don’t get to do is.
Plus Elminster could genuinely solve all of it in about three hours, so he shouldn’t have even been there to say:
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“So I hear you’re an unstable antimagical nuclear weapon now Gale?”.
Then teleport away without doing anything about it.
But eh, the story and stakes are all over the place.
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It isn’t even actually mind flayers! It’s just mid-level clerics of the three gods who job harder than Skeletor, with a plan so intensely stupid - fucking around with Illithid - that it can only function via the power of a saturday morning cartoon villain’s mcguffin.
It’s… like the Battle Angel Alita movie. It likes the source material too much, so it crams in too many elements from much later and weakens itself in the process. Or perhaps the poison of escalation.
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It isn’t just hints of the mind flayer space empire, it’s a netherese superweapon, no wait, it’s also the Dead Three! The city you’ll reach in thirty hours will be destroyed - and the entire world hangs in the balance! Only your level 12 characters can save the universe!
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rambling
Maybe something like “a person who exists in a completely parallel society from humanity, or who is actually detached from the political”. They can do Great Things, but never change anything. They have a psychotic, maddening, power concentrated in themselves that defies the human agency of all around them, but mostly concern themselves with negating the ones who use it that way. If all superheroes and supervillains disappeared, nobody would notice, they leave no ripples on history. Or, perhaps they’re like the weather. Or police.
A superhero only really interacts with other superheroes or supervillains, they don’t impact the real world outside of a few personal relationships. Their adventures might save many lives, but they don’t stop the genocide - saving a schoolbus full of children from going over a cliff certainly matters a lot to those kids and their families, but there’s always another drone strike.
Ah, like the opening chapter of Miracleman. A dreamlike heroism, which can play with the words and shapes of the real world but cannot challenge them. Vast emotions, and a vaster repression.
Though, sure, there are plenty of comics that would challenge that.
tl;dr - a superhero does nothing, very loudly.