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August Lashes Out
Been a hot minute since I complained about summer weather. I’ve been enjoying the AC, so it has helped to keep me mellow during my least favorite season.
Volcanic 🌋 Fury
Every year, August lashes out in volcanic fury, rising with the din of morning traffic, its great metallic wings smashing against the ground, heating the air with ever-increasing intensity. ~Henry Rollins
Yeah, that.
One of the highlights of summer is that it coincides with hurricane season. Fred and Henri have marched right over us in the last week or so. Grace had the decency to swerve off to Mexico, so that’s nice.
Typically, a passing shower tends to take the edge off of a scorching summer day. Not so with hurricanes.
They’re formed by tropical winds and run roughshod over whatever stretch of real estate they traverse. Despite the driving rains and wild winds, tropical nastiness propels them like afterburners.
The electricity went out the other night and we were stuck with a dreadfully hot wait for it to come back on again. No fans. No AC. Nothing but the incessant beeping of my computer’s battery backup device. Really irritating.
To blazes with summer. It can’t be over soon enough…
Hot 🌶️ Hot 🌶️ Hot
Evolution of Human Torch in movies and cartoons
While I don’t like hot weather, I do like hot heroes. The first hero I came up with for The Sentinels was Foxfire.
Thing is, I was thinking of a subsequent version of Foxfire who is constantly at odds with his team.
At risk of divulging spoilers, I won’t go much further than that at this point.
The different fire-based heroes and villains of comics have interesting ways of making use of their powers.
Some, like The Human Torch (both android and cosmic ray affected human), can actually create fire from nothing while others can only manipulate externally created fire like Pyro from the X-Men does.
Even though fire powers are a classic superhero trope, there are a lot of downsides. Stuff burns. People burn. Throwing fire around is likely to cause irreparable harm to people either directly or as an unintended side-effect of being stuck somewhere that’s suddenly ablaze.
Tim learned these lessons the hard way over his tenure as a professional superhero. I haven’t decided whether or not he had the foresight to record his findings for future generations. There are interesting issues either way.
Hmm, I’ll have to give that some more thought. At least i can do so with an adequately charged AC running…
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Hot 🌶️ Take
All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story… They are terrible people. ~Nina Bawden
Wow, that’s kind of rough.🙄 It is, however, pretty true.
Writers, myself included, take a rather perverse glee in torturing our characters. That’s called “drama”.
In real life, we all want to find our happy place and just chill or thrill. I’m definitely in the chill camp.
In fiction, that’s considered boring. Nobody wants to read a happy story. Even comedies are contingent on bad things happening to good people. In comedies, the bad stuff gets resolved and they live happily ever after. In tragedies, they don’t.
Hell, I have books in my library on different ways to torment, harm and even torture my characters. I’ve been consulting with friends who have medical knowledge on how to “realistically” deal with bodily harm.
I mean, it’s a superhero story. Duke ’em ups are a given. Whether swatting down cannon fodder or conducting an epic final boss fight, it’s part of the genre that someone’s getting shot at, stabbed or punched in the nose.
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There are different ends of the spectrum when it comes to this, but I’m trying to depict the fact that actions have consequences.
It’s all in good fun to have guys get punched and kicked around the room with big ¡!¡EXCLAMATIONS!¡! over top of the theatrically held/near miss blows but if that happened in reality, people could suffer concussions, broken bones, lost teeth or even fall the wrong way and die.
On the other hand, I’m not going for the gritty, super-realistic special ops CQC that’s depicted in the Punisher clip. Well, I may not be going for it but that’s where some fights actually arrive.
The Sentinels assist the ECPD’s TacDiv on their missions. The team’s superpowers are typically utilized to give a tactical advantage to the TacDiv operators. They’re not in there to go ¡!¡Sock!¡!, ¡!¡Boom!¡!, ¡!¡Powee!¡!. They’re there for shock and awe in hopes of defusing a dangerous situation quickly.
Up to this point, The Sentinels hadn’t suffered any casualties. Foxfire was already very experienced in using his powers effectively before the team was formed. Captain Freedom was an Army veteran with over a century of active duty combat experience. Mary Christmas, despite her diminutive physique, is fully bulletproof and has been pulling her punches significantly ever since she was compelled to join the team.
Tanda’s sacrifice play is a wake-up call for the team. Even though they’ve been as lucky as they were judicious, bad things could have happened any time since the formation of the team in 1992. That they went from 1992 to 2005 without any hospitalizations is almost inexplicable.
But then again, it’s fiction. I’m making the whole thing up. If they went 13 years without anybody getting seriously hurt, it’s because I said so. I’m the author. I can do pretty much whatever I want. As long as I’m internally consistent, the willing suspension of disbelief that the superhero genre depends on will provide me with ample amounts of leeway to tell the story however I think it should go.
That’s a lot of responsibility. Telling an interesting story without resorting to cheap tricks and deus ex machina to get my characters where I want them to be is all part of the challenge. Playing God isn’t easy, but it sure is fun…
Spider-Man Movie (2002) – With Great Power
Comes Great Responsibility Scene (10/10) | Movieclips
That’s it for today. There’s plenty of stuff to do and less than half a week left to do it.