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Also, as a non-Christian you're probably missing the vastly more significant implications of "Jesus Christ, specifically, was an alien." Like, Christ isn't just some guy who happened to also be God; he was able to redeem humanity because he was Man and God, able to stand in for us, so to speak. If he was an alien, that either means that salvation was extended a lot more broadly than we thought, or, more disturbingly, that we weren't actually included in that process. Realizing that maybe God didn't make the universe for us, and we're just second-order creations of his actual children means that we're an accidental, cast-off leftovers -- in other words, we're not actually any better than David (or the mewling, excremental proto-Xenomorph in the stinger). Which is exactly the realization that Shaw is desperately trying to deny at the end of the film. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 08:04
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im an alien not jesus christ tho, nor yeshua the mad carpenter
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Dec 2, 2018 08:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Also, as a non-Christian you're probably missing the vastly more significant implications of "Jesus Christ, specifically, was an alien." A story about religious folks wrestling with that sounds kind of neat actually. You don't know if you're saved, for all you know your place is just to spread his teachings back to his own kind to save them instead. Or maybe you're pointless entirely.
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Dec 2, 2018 08:09
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See, that's just not my reading of the film at all. Shaw's lost her faith but that doesn't mean she's suddenly concerned with a complex theological proposal about aliens, she's concerned about whether humans mean anything to their deadbeat alien dads. Especially since, to be very clear, Jesus the person was not an alien in Prometheus. The titular metaphorical Prometheus was the guy who drank Death Juice and fell off a waterfall in the intro, seeding our planet for complex alien-derived life, which must have happened prior to the evolution of modern humans. There's no actual Jesus the Alien scene or event. E: though a scene where a giant grey alien Jesus is subdued by Roman soldiers as he goes hulk would have been pure gold.
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Dec 2, 2018 08:21
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Joe Slowboat posted:See, that's just not my reading of the film at all. Shaw's lost her faith but that doesn't mean she's suddenly concerned with a complex theological proposal about aliens, she's concerned about whether humans mean anything to their deadbeat alien dads. She is, however, extremely upset by and in denial about the thought that she could be anything like David, and expects to get answers about why she was made and the purpose of human existence from the aliens. She doesn't need to be concerned with Christology specifically for the parallels to work, and if the movie had included literal alien Jesus it would have have still fit in very nicely with the kind of anxieties that Shaw experiences. Joe Slowboat posted:E: though a scene where a giant grey alien Jesus is subdued by Roman soldiers as he goes hulk would have been pure gold. Basically, yeah. People overestimate the level of class and prestige that Prometheus is "supposed" to have when in reality it's basically the inspiration-child of trashy, surreal Italian sci-fi horror. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 08:25
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I read Shaw really differently than you do, I guess, because I see her and David as similar in that they both recognize that there's a pseudoparental and fundamentally unloving relationship between humanity's creators and humanity, but Shaw wants to understand who the aliens are actually and David just wants to prove that all dad are evil. Her response to trauma and the loss of faith is to try to help people, his response to his lovely father I s to become a murderer and a rapist. He also gets his head ripped off and only has any chance of learning what he wants to know by her mercy at the end. David ultimately lost on every conceivable level other than killing his father. Shaw won, because she survived and didn't break. Of course, Shaw is lucky enough to have had the only good parents in the film, and even though she no longer sees her parents as divine and worthy of worship or rebellion (David casts himself as Satan, because Weyland is cast as god... until he meets Bigger God) she still has a good relationship with them. Edited to add more about Shaw's position as 'not totally traumatized by her father' - her trauma is her father's death, a much less evil failing than 'being abusive to everyone around him.' Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 08:31
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anybody here reading wilde life? its p wod sometimes
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Dec 2, 2018 08:34
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Joe Slowboat posted:David ultimately lost on every conceivable level other than killing his father. Shaw won, because she survived and didn't break. Of course, Shaw is lucky enough to have had the only good parents in the film, and even though she no longer sees her parents as divine and worthy of worship or rebellion (David casts himself as Satan, because Weyland is cast as god... until he meets Bigger God) she still has a good relationship with them. I mean, that's what makes the story beat in Alien: Covenant work: Shaw was a good enough person that eventually she was able to take pity on David despite everything he did to her, and she died for it. Being a good person doesn't stop bad things from happening to you, and Satan gets to luxuriate in his rule over a loveless Hell and nurse his wounded ego. Covenant suffers somewhat from really obviously being the middle movie in a trilogy that will never be finished, but ultimately I still think it fits into the larger arc of the franchise given that in Alien 1-2-3, Ripley discovers the evil he created, tries to warn everyone, and ultimately sacrifices herself intentionally to save humanity. And then Resurrection takes a steaming poo poo all over everything but that's Whedon for you. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 08:38
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this is the only take on the engineers im interested in tbh
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Dec 2, 2018 08:45
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AvP is the product of a mind that looks at rape monsters and asks "but how can I make this more toyetic?" there's a certain grotesque poetry to this but it's a little too much for me
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Dec 2, 2018 08:54
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Also, as a non-Christian you're probably missing the vastly more significant implications of "Jesus Christ, specifically, was an alien." Actually, yes, I missed this. The idea that Christ was a savior of the engineers and we are just some monkeys who happened to be made by them is a really cool idea to play with. I do however feel that's reading it too generously - if God The Father only cared about what happened to the engineers, why did he send his Alien son to die on Earth, at the hands of humans? Joe Slowboat posted:Especially since, to be very clear, Jesus the person was not an alien in Prometheus. The titular metaphorical Prometheus was the guy who drank Death Juice and fell off a waterfall in the intro, seeding our planet for complex alien-derived life, which must have happened prior to the evolution of modern humans. No, he was. There's a line in the movie about how an engineer visited earth around two thousand years ago, after which the engineers got angry and decided to exterminate humanity. Lindelof has said that in the script before he got to it it was entirely explicit that Jesus was an engineer, but even with the scene as written there's not much else it could have been about. Unless, idk, Caeser was an engineer - but that doesn't fit in with any of the themes Prometheus is playing with. For the record, I LOVE the Freudian "God is literally your father" concept, and think it fits pretty alright in the movie (which, to be clear, did not at all work for me.) I don't take it literally but I think it's a really neat idea, and if Scott wasn't old and convinced of his own genius he probably could have done something subtle and brilliant with it like he did with Blade Runner.
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Dec 2, 2018 08:54
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Digital Osmosis posted:Actually, yes, I missed this. The idea that Christ was a savior of the engineers and we are just some monkeys who happened to be made by them is a really cool idea to play with. I do however feel that's reading it too generously - if God The Father only cared about what happened to the engineers, why did he send his Alien son to die on Earth, at the hands of humans? Well, as I suggested earlier, I think if Scott had got to make a third film in the trilogy it would have ultimately been kinder to human beings than the first two, and even without it that's still the direction the series as a whole takes -- with the ultimate point being that even if we're no better than David or the Engineers, we're no worse either, and Alien Jesus came for all of us. Just speculation, though.
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Dec 2, 2018 09:00
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Ah, yeah, I missed that incredibly bad line. I still think killing Shaw off between movies is as stupid as killing off Newt and the others was for Aliens: The Series Declines. It absolutely misses that she has far more potential to be interesting as the victor than David does. If David wins, his boring rebellion-by-replicating-the-cycle is all we get. If Shaw wins, we get her AND we get the severed head of David to provide his perspective as he grapples with losing. But, frankly, Scott seems to just assume that fathers are interesting and mothers must be left out of the story as much as possible, despite the mother figures in the series being vastly more interesting. E: I thought there was going to be a third? If not, I am well pleased because I don't believe it would have improved anything. On the other hand I hope they make a BR2079 in 30 years.
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Dec 2, 2018 09:03
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I like Alien 3 better than the films that precede it, and Prometheus best of any of them. I also don't remember that line at all, but it's been a few years.
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Dec 2, 2018 09:04
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I like Alien 3 better than the films that precede it, and Prometheus best of any of them. I don't think we're going to agree on much about Scott's oeuvre.
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Dec 2, 2018 09:05
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avp has alexa woods in it tho
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Dec 2, 2018 09:07
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Joe Slowboat posted:I don't think we're going to agree on much about Scott's oeuvre. I also thought that BR 2049 was overlong, sentimental, and obnoxiously obsessed with the self-importance of sad brooding men, while the best parts of it were completely redundant with Blade Runner anyways. So yeah, probably not. 
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Dec 2, 2018 09:08
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sexpig by night posted:'do random poo poo and then let them make the connections' is good but it has to be done in a controlled situation. Like, you do have to have at least the outline of a plan even if you're letting them fill in the details. At the risk of veering into territory better-suited for the GM Advice Thread, I want to concur with the above but also emphasize that last sentence - "...can lead to a lot of annoyances from the players as they create plot threads you don't resolve and all." The issue isn't that "do random poo poo and then let them make the connections" is a bad idea, it's that it's an incomplete one. Do random poo poo and then let them make the connections but then follow up on those connections and use them to build a story with. Throwing poo poo at the wall only works if you actually bother to look and see what sticks, and then use that.
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Dec 2, 2018 09:41
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Stay out of Atlanta, folks. When you factor in the Wraith population it has a staggeringly low supernatural:human ratio of 1:558 (rising to 1:5,500 if you count the entire Atlanta metropolitan area, without adding in entries from those adjacent areas to the ratio will actually be lower) and even without it's at 1:2,800 (1:28,000). EDIT: Well, it did, anyway. The massive die-offs of 1997's Blood Plague and the 1999 Sabbat-Camarilla East Coast War and the Great Collapse of the Underworld have probably purged it a lot, as well as the c. 2004 Concordian Civil War.
Loomer fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 10:44
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actually its mostly just shermans doing
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Dec 2, 2018 10:58
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Couple more sans wraiths. Berlin ~1:32,000, Birmingham AL 1:14,000, Black Forest regions 1:28,500, Finland 1:259,000, Haiti 1:161,800, India 1:436,200.
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Dec 2, 2018 11:39
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Tollymain posted:avp has alexa woods in it tho Also the Sled-Ride of Friendship.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:06
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Loomer posted:Stay out of Atlanta, folks. When you factor in the Wraith population it has a staggeringly low supernatural:human ratio of 1:558 (rising to 1:5,500 if you count the entire Atlanta metropolitan area, without adding in entries from those adjacent areas to the ratio will actually be lower) and even without it's at 1:2,800 (1:28,000). EDIT: Well, it did, anyway. The massive die-offs of 1997's Blood Plague and the 1999 Sabbat-Camarilla East Coast War and the Great Collapse of the Underworld have probably purged it a lot, as well as the c. 2004 Concordian Civil War. Is that the lowest ratio you've found so far? Would be curious to know which place in the oWoD was the most crammed with supernaturals.
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Dec 2, 2018 14:45
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The absolute lowest is 1:0 because there's a couple of communities that consist entirely of Garou kinfolk. The lowest not total ratio so far is, I believe, Tryon, North Carolina. Home to 13 mages and 1 Kitsune, the ratio c. 2000 would be 1:125. The single most populated city is Los Angeles, though - some ~320 total including suburbs not including wraiths and with some doubling due to the wartime entries and post-1999 Anarch Free State-Quincunx War displacement. With wraiths, it jumps to about 326. Ratio though is only ~1:10,500 local LA only or 1:35,000 LA megapolis. Edit 2: Now that I have the datasets all but finalized I can go to stage 2 of the pop ratio line of inquiry, where rather than doing them on the fly each time (hence why they sometimes vary from post to post) I settle on a population value (I believe using information from 2000 where available is preferable outside of specifix contexts, as it falls squarely in the middle of the 'cemented' oWoD run (roughly 1995 to 2004 - first edition and early second edition weirdness is mostly done by then)) and plug it directly into the spreadsheets, along with an output option for the relative depicted proportions of supernaturals to each other and to humans within a location and a date filter to gate out stuff like the hundred+ khan who died in India before 1957 where desired. Most of the values so far are kind of 'maximum 20th century' because I haven't set that up fully yet, so they might include someone who died in 1931 right next to someone who was born in 1980 for ratio purposes. Loomer fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 14:54
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I also thought that BR 2049 was overlong, sentimental, and obnoxiously obsessed with the self-importance of sad brooding men, while the best parts of it were completely redundant with Blade Runner anyways. we may disagree about the alien movies, but we agree about this at least although i didn't think it was terrible, just that it didn't really have a reason to exist. loving gorgeous, though.
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Dec 2, 2018 15:13
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Basically, yeah. People overestimate the level of class and prestige that Prometheus is "supposed" to have when in reality it's basically the inspiration-child of trashy, surreal Italian sci-fi horror.
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Dec 2, 2018 16:30
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quote:Restricted by a low budget, Bava was unable to utilize opticals, so all of the film's extensive visual effects work were done "in camera". Miniatures and forced perspective visuals are used throughout, with lots of colored fog adding atmosphere but also obscuring the sheer cheapness of the sets.[6] Bava explained: "Do you know what that unknown planet was made of? A couple of plastic rocks — yes, two: one and one! — left over from a mythological movie made at Cinecittà! To assist the illusion, I filled the set with smoke."[7] According to Tim Lucas, the two plastic rocks were multiplied in several shots by mirrors and multiple exposures. The planet's exterior sequences were filmed on an empty stage obscured by mists, table top miniatures and Schüfftan process shots.[7]
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Dec 2, 2018 16:49
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I feel like I've derailed things enough about Prometheus so I'm going to not make my case for BR2049 unless there's actual interest, but suffice it to say I think it has a lot of depth as well as being extremely pretty, though it is of course not perfect.
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Dec 2, 2018 19:10
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Joe Slowboat posted:I feel like I've derailed things enough about Prometheus so I'm going to not make my case for BR2049 unless there's actual interest, but suffice it to say I think it has a lot of depth as well as being extremely pretty, though it is of course not perfect. I actually was gonna message you about this stuff rather than talk Prometheus here when this whole thing started, but you don't have PMs. At any rate I really respect your analysis of Mage and would be interested in hearing what you have to say; much as I disliked BR2049 it's not on my "never watch again" list or anything. I'm Tuxedo Catfish#1344 on Discord, if that works better than here.
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Dec 2, 2018 19:15
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Discord, if that works better than here. I'll shoot you a DM on there; I just haven't taken the time to figure out anything but posting on SA, so Discord's simpler for me. Right, I should add, I'm on there as Son of Silk and Stone, which attests to my embarrassing love of Exalted. e: for the record BR2049 is also a Promethean story, but I don't think Blade Runner is. ee: to help things get back on track, I may need to flesh out a particular court* of spirits that my Thyrsus player accidentally created. The ruling spirit is a weird mutant (a secrecy-spirit that effectively got drenched in the radioactive resonance of a Bound God and the bindings thereon, and has become a spirit defined by blood sacrifice, secrecy, and service to the Nemesis) but the choir in general are only somewhat tainted by blood and chains, rather than being magath. I've mostly populated the choir with bloody hands murder spirits and more secret spirits, but I would love more examples of emotional or human-associated spirit types that might flesh it out. My impression is that spirits by default gang up in choirs by their general family, so it would be most natural to have vaguely humanoid spirits thronging around Hooded Blasphemy and Coils, Archimandrite of the Red Nightmare (that being the court name). Any fun canon or custom spirits that could get in on this? *I might have the term wrong. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Dec 2, 2018 |
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Dec 2, 2018 21:37
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Werewolf History is an oral tradition. ...I keep thinking about what would happen if you deliberately scrambled a generation of Garau by feeding them any other narrative than the Luna/Father Wolf one.
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Dec 3, 2018 18:24
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Crasical posted:Werewolf History is an oral tradition. Luna still communicates with the Forsaken in various ways. The only way to stop that is by removing their auspices and then you get the Pure.
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Dec 3, 2018 19:24
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Garou are oWoD and Uratha are nWoD. Also, the werewolves do adapt their beliefs to fit their own cultures - you can see it in the Dark Eras stuff about werewolves, where the Father Wolf mythology gets reinterpreted in various ways while retaining the core. The core is retained because the tribes are in literal contact with spirits that were present at the event.
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Dec 3, 2018 19:26
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Werewolf plot idea: the lost library of the Iron Masters lodge of "people who decided we should really maybe write this stuff down after all", including comparative analysis of the fallibility of spirit memory and how their explanation of events has differed over the centuries (even as told by the exact same spirit).
bewilderment fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 00:57
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bewilderment posted:Werewolf plot idea: the lost library of the Iron Masters lodge of "people who decided we should really maybe write this stuff down after all", including comparative analysis of the fallibility of spirit memory and how their explanation of events has different over the centuries (even as told by the exact same spirit).
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Dec 4, 2018 01:05
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So what would people here suggest for a game to be a group's first introduction to the nWoD/CoD games? Also how do people suggest trying to come up with a plot?
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Dec 4, 2018 01:12
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Mortals or vampire are the most straight forward, vampire comes with the added bonus of having a powerful person force the group together for a mission too.
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Dec 4, 2018 01:22
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I tried to do Mage for both me and my players first foray into nWod. My players loved it but it was extremely stressful for me to run it.
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Dec 4, 2018 01:26
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Nessus posted:The cruel lair of Zi-Zek, where honest spirits of Enigma and Mystery are systematically tormented and reforged into twisted things of Ideology and Unitary Critical Perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7CYDTSDjA0
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Dec 4, 2018 01:26
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Zizek is a Free Council Scelestus
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Dec 4, 2018 01:37
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