Caltrops - Cabaret Voltron





	[quote name="The Cheap Zseni Machine"][quote name="Horrible Gelatinous Blob"] On the other hand, when I was a wee Blob and more slightly discomfiting than full on Horrible, I would play Transformers and GI Joe with my friends, and we would have epic wars with each other. Minor skirmishes would develop into larger battles before exploding into total warfare. Then we would team up and destroy some imaginary bad guy. We always won, and there fore we were always happy in the end. The point I'm trying to make is that conflict is what made imaginary play interesting. Without conflict, you're pretty much just sitting around, masturbating to a mirror. My question is did these girls express conflict in this manner because they had learned that it was the only acceptable expression of conflict, or was it because they're only happy when they're miserable?[/quote] The point I had been trying to make is that I have never fully understood why conflict is necessary to make things interesting, whether that conflict is of the Lifetime or the Robotech variety. I do enjoy both kinds of melodrama, but - especially when I'm playing games of any sort that allow me to choose these sorts of things - I would much rather everyone started happy and stayed happy. SimCity was a panic for me; I'd cheat, get lots of money, build a beautiful city, disallow natural disasters, and brutally overpower anything that even vaguely threatened the peace (which I didn't enjoy doing, but it had to be done so everyone would be happy!) The Sims - lovely big houses, lavishly decorated, containing happy happy people!!!! The only conflict that interested me there was optimizing furniture placement. Master Of Magic - I'd build enormous civilizations that spanned the continent and would hope that nobody else in the game felt like fighting. I didn't want to fight, I just wanted to build happy fertile cities! In RPGs like Morrowind or Neverwinter Nights or whatever, I can't even <i>roleplay</i> hurting people. I HAVE to play lawful good, not because I adore laws, but because everyone is happier if I play by the rules! Happy happy happy for everyone! You guys just sit there and be happy and I'll get rid of the big bad threat and then we can all be happy together! Morrowind actually lets you do this, you can eventually kill all the bad stuff EVER and just cheerfully roam the hills to collect herbs or visit temples or whatever. Huzzah! In Doom and Quake, I didn't like to play the nasty monster-ridden levels!!! I'd set up lan or online play and turn off monsters and play - you're going to love this - <i>hide and seek</i> with people. Post-Quake, I couldn't interest a single person in this sort of thing. Happy, peaceful, trouble-free imaginary play doesn't seem the least bit dull to me. Nothing about it resembles mirror-aided masturbation, except the part where I have to do it alone because it appears to disgust everyone else. Happy, peaceful, trouble-free fiction doesn't bother me at all either; this is probably why of all the poetry and prose I've ever read, I enjoy most the traditional haiku, which, in their discoveries of the trivial beauties and everyday surprises of the natural world, beautifully, elegantly, and briefly written, are to me the best possible use of words. I really don't think there's anything less gay about ricer racing or space opera conflict than Lifetime conflict; I think most guys' approximations of space combat are generally more interesting than most women's approximations of bad relationships, but that's purely a subjective judgment that has no basis whatsoever in the actual quality of either group. They're still both contrived, both fantastical, both equally susceptible to bad writing, and both of interest primarily to their own authors. Comic books and romance novels are the same level of ridiculous and unrealistic swill, and I think the fields of fantasy and sci-fi fiction form a tidy continuum between the two, and there are volumes in all those fields that are enjoyable and quite a lot of shit that is interesting to hobbyists and fans only. And, of course, some of the most popular and enduring works of all time are half romance novel and half comic book: Star Wars, Star Trek, Gauntlet.... <a href="http://www.subreality.com/marysue/explain.htm">By the way, here is a term you primadonnas should have learned a long time ago.</a>[/quote]