I’ve been cautiously optimistic about the Green Lantern film coming out because it seemed to be truly embracing the cosmic aspect of the character. The truly cosmic, science fiction elements of mainstream superheroes are an aspect which previous films have deliberately shied away from. (Rise of the Silver Surfer and X-Men 3, for example, both galloped away from Galactus and the true scope of the Phoenix Saga as quickly as possible, for example.) So seeing a film that didn’t seem afraid to shy away from some of the coolest stuff in the superhero mythos is potentially exciting.

But I’ll be honest that the trailer they’ve been showing hasn’t exactly filled me with a lot of confidence.

A few days ago, however, this footage from WonderCon was released:

And I am now 100% sold on this movie. The release date cannot get here fast enough.

If you’ve been skeptical about Green Lantern until now, check out this new footage. One can only hope that they start distributing it as the new trailer sooner rather than later, because it’s selling the movie in way that the existing trailer completely failed to do.

From “The Psychology of Immersion” by Jamie Madigan:

The game world also needs to behave as you’d expect it to. “Consistency is the single most important factor in creating a real sense of place,” says Josh Foreman, an experienced designer at ArenaNet who works on the Guild Wars games. “The style can be anything from photo-real to abstract to impressionism, as long as there is an internal logic to what the player perceives.” This means that in-game characters, objects, and other aspects of the world should behave like their real-world counterparts.

Interesting to read this in the context of dissociated mechanics in paper ‘n pencil roleplaying games.

This is a random bit of nifty animation that doesn’t seem to have garnered much attention.

It’s a bachelor project from the same animation workshop that developed the better known “Saga of Biorn”, which is also worth watching for completely different reasons:

When encountering a hostile force, a group of PCs can:

1. Fight
2. Avoid
3. Flee
4. Negotiate
5. Trick
6. Suborn
7. Call Reinforcements

First Thought: When you’re designing a scenario, just give a couple seconds of thought to how a group of NPCs might react to each stratagem. If something particularly clever occurs to you, jot it down and perhaps restructure the scenario to better support it.

Second Thought: When NPCs encounter a hostile force (i.e., the PCs) they can have the same reactions. Think about it.

“There’s a huge plot hole in Lord of the Rings! The eagles could have just flown the ring to Mordor and dropped it in the volcano! The whole movie/book could have been resolved in like 5 minutes!”

You’ve probably heard this hoary old chestnut before. It’s been circling around for decades. It’s got all the traits for a great little meme: It has the aura of cleverness and it attacks something popular.

It’s also complete bullshit.

(And it almost universally indicates that the person uttering it will have absolutely nothing of value to say about The Lord of the Rings.)

Basically, this “plot hole” boils down to two questions.

First: Is it actually a viable solution?

Second: Should it have been talked about at the Council of Elrond?

DOES IT WORK?

Most people treat this as if it were some sort of “slam dunk”. But there are several reasons why the Eagle Solution either definitely won’t work, probably won’t work, or may not work:

(1) There are no Eagles in Rivendell. Although movie-Gandalf has the ability to summon them with his skills as a butterfly whisperer, that’s not an ability he demonstrates in the books. So you’d have to go and get them and then bring them back (a journey almost as long as trekking to Mordor in the first place).

(2) Even then they might say “no”, in which case you’ve wasted a lot of time. (In fact, they would probably say no, as any perusal of their characterization in the novels would suggest.)

(3) On the one hand you’ve got the dangerous temptation of carrying the Ringbearer a couple hundred feet off the ground (splat); on the other hand you have very powerful creatures (on an order similar to Gandalf). Gandalf specifically warns against this mix of power-and-temptation multiple times throughout the novel.

(5) Bad Shit happens every time Sauron gets line-of-sight on Frodo. Flying the Ring into Mordor would automatically mean putting it in Sauron’s line-of-sight.

(6) You’ve also got Saruman’s crebain spies, which become more difficult to avoid if you’re flying.

(7) On top of all this, we have absolutely no idea what aerial defenses Sauron might have had before he was killed. Endless arguments can be had one way and the other about the effectiveness and/or location of the flying Nazgul or the efficacy in catching the Eagles, but for all we know the Eye could have blasted the Eagle straight out of the sky.

Quite a few variants of the “just have an Eagle do it” scenario will usually be proffered at this point in an effort to mitigate some or all of these problems with the plan. (Have the Eagle just carry Frodo. Blindfold the Eagle. Walk most of the way to Mordor and then just fly the last little jaunt. Et cetera.) But these efforts basically admit that there are inherent problems with this plan, which brings us to…

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DISCUSSED!

Here the claim is made that “every possible plan is discussed” at the Council of Elrond except for using the Eagles. Therefore, even if it isn’t viable, it’s a plot hole that it wasn’t included on the agenda.

But this argument is based on a false premise: That every possible plan was discussed at the Council of Elrond.

That’s not actually true. It feels true because Tolkien is, in fact, a very good storyteller. But the reality is that there are lots of plans that aren’t considered. For example, the Fellowship could instead head straight to the sea coast and sail to Gondor. This would have cut weeks off their travel time and avoided the threats of Saruman, the Misty Mountains, and Moria entirely.

My point here isn’t that “they should totally hit that ocean!” (There, are in fact, as many problems with that plan as there are with the Eagles plan, starting with Mordor-sponsored pirates and going on from there.) My point is that the Council of Rivendell wasn’t written to serve as an exhaustive checklist of every single option that could conceivably be taken. It would be a dreadfully boring scene if it was.

Rather, Tolkien includes a few such discussions in order to dramatically hit the beat of “we discussed other options”. (He also uses most of those bits to simultaneously establish other important bits of exposition.) But once that beat has been established, Tolkien moves on to the next dramatic beat.

People think they discussed every option because Tolkien makes you think that through effective storytelling. But there are lots of options that aren’t explicitly raised in the text itself, and there isn’t any particular reason why every single option should be encyclopedically rejected in the text.

THE FUNNY BIT AT THE END

With that being said, this is pretty funny:

But it’s as much a meaningful critique of Lord of the Rings as this is:

Bald Eagle photo by Keven Law. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.