New StarCraft Comic: "The Keep"

[Nissa]

Oh, that was a thing.

Love the art, gotta say. Not so much on the people, but the tech and backgrounds were nice and gritty. I liked the color combinations too. Only trouble is, the story is pretty generic, and so are the themes. It feels really weird when Starcraft has clear-cut morals. Starcraft was never a morality play, and making it seem like one is...odd.

On the other hand, it wasn't offensively bad. Just a bit generic.

[ragnarok]

Oh, that was a thing.

Love the art, gotta say. Not so much on the people, but the tech and backgrounds were nice and gritty. I liked the color combinations too. Only trouble is, the story is pretty generic, and so are the themes. It feels really weird when Starcraft has clear-cut morals. Starcraft was never a morality play, and making it seem like one is...odd.

On the other hand, it wasn't offensively bad. Just a bit generic.

You'd rather have EVERYONE be so completely morally grey? There has to be those that lean towards one side or another, not just stay in the middle.

[KaiserStratosTygo]

That's the biggest weakness in modern "starcraft" is the heroes/villains nonsense.

[ragnarok]

That's the biggest weakness in modern "starcraft" is the heroes/villains nonsense.

Staying in the middle isn't always a good thing, Stratos. You already know that.

[TcheQuevara]

Oh, that was a thing.

Love the art, gotta say. Not so much on the people, but the tech and backgrounds were nice and gritty. I liked the color combinations too. Only trouble is, the story is pretty generic, and so are the themes. It feels really weird when Starcraft has clear-cut morals. Starcraft was never a morality play, and making it seem like one is...odd.

On the other hand, it wasn't offensively bad. Just a bit generic.

It's because it seems everyone is California is influenced by this terrible, terrible mistake in narrative theory.

Now with Metzen gone, maybe we will have less og his gut feeling/common sense/traditional wisdom (which was both innovative and limited) and more of the academic, flawed thinking on how stories work that has made every drama in Hollywood the same.

Or maybe we will have new creators trying out their ideas, because that's what we need: a more diverse cast of "Metzens", a bigger number of them, not streamline industrial production of stories, because that's what Mythic Structure is.

Do you want to know more? Look for "aristotelian drama". We've been through this already literally centuries ago. People arguing their formula was the best way to tell stories. By disobeying it we got Shakespeare, Molière, Brecht, the guys who defined what writing stories for non-literary media could be like until the middle of the 20th century. But Star Wars worked, and worked because its clever structure and use of myth, which is excellent, but now people think using this as a formula will make their stories better, which, as you can see with Nova: The Keep, isn't true at all.

Regardless of the silly morality of it, I liked it and I like that we can have someone solidly trying to be good like Valerian, as long as they don't overdo it.

[Robear]

It feels really weird when Starcraft has clear-cut morals. Starcraft was never a morality play, and making it seem like one is...odd.

You'd rather have EVERYONE be so completely morally grey? There has to be those that lean towards one side or another, not just stay in the middle.

That's the biggest weakness in modern "starcraft" is the heroes/villains nonsense.

Staying in the middle isn't always a good thing, Stratos. You already know that.

It sort of feels like Rag is addressing a version of Kaiser's argument that I'm not sure he's making. There's a difference between every character being morally neutral and the overall narrative taking a morally neutral tone. Like the situation in Brood War where Raynor and Fenix are portrayed as wholly good characters, but they don't win, is different from a situation where all of the characters have no morals and act purely out of self-interest. And I don't know which you're arguing about.

Just speaking for myself here I thought it felt more compelling when there are a whole host of characters who are doing what they think is right, but the different visions don't line up. So like you've got Aldaris and Tassadar and Mengsk and Duke, who all think their approach is the right way.
Of course the game favors Tassadar and Raynor's points of view, but that doesn't mean that Aldaris was evil or anything. Wings of Liberty SORT OF had this kind of situation if you, as Raynor, chose not to help Hanson, where both the characters were morally good. That could have been a great moment if it wasn't so obvious that the moral choice system in that game had no narrative stakes or consequences whatsoever, and whichever you picked Hanson would just be written out of the game, never to be mentioned again, in WoL or the sequels.

For this comic, would it be a better story if Valerian's moral choice to come clean ended up backfiring and made the situation in the Dominion worse, instead of portraying it as just a solid positive? I don't know.
Will it be a boring story if Valerian literally never does anything wrong? Maybe, maybe not. All he's done since his WoL appearance is be helpful and do what the game approves as the right thing all along, with just 'doing the right thing' as his motivation.

I like that we can have someone solidly trying to be good like Valerian, as long as they don't overdo it.

Yeah, it's fine, I might like it more if he just stops being a main character then, he's kind of bland. If he keeps just consistently being put in a rough spot, thinking "I won't follow my father's footsteps," and then doing the right thing and coming out A-OK.

[TheEconomist]

I see dark colors and more realistic atmosphere. At this point, that's all a fan can ask for.

Also, when are these comic creators goes to get with the times and do digital versions? I hate to keep bootleggin' the shit like a scrub.

a more diverse cast of "Metzens", a bigger number of them, not streamline industrial production of stories, because that's what Mythic Structure is.

Yeah, no. I been reading some Military Sci-fi on sale from Amazon for $1.99 including the audiobooks. So far, ALL of them have been better than what I can see Metzen having any direct influence on. These books were written by self-publishing amateurs, probably about my age.

That should say something.

[drakolobo]

I like the type of massacre story that they give, but I did not like the art of classic aspect too much, I would really like the art of the following to be more similar to the visual aspect of the first comic, that comi artanis artanis would have also been favored with This type of art or the application of more detail in the scenes

[TcheQuevara]

Yeah, it's fine, I might like it more if he just stops being a main character then, he's kind of bland. If he keeps just consistently being put in a rough spot, thinking "I won't follow my father's footsteps," and then doing the right thing and coming out A-OK.

Adding to your comment, I like how morals affect Game of Thrones. Good isn't rewarded, evil isn't rewarded. Honor has a price, as it usually does; even cruelty has a price, as it sometime does. And even being perfectly pragmatic isn't always the best choice because medieval societies do rally after brave leaders. And despite for the narrative pushing a little the side of saying pragmatism is the best politics, there are good and evil characters. Even if the good ones are flawed, that's pretty clear that they are noble people.

It isn't "grim dark". True goodness exists, it just has a price.

Valerian, since HotS, is having his cake and eating eat. In DT Saga em WoL he was ambiguous, and that was very cool. In HotS he's still ambiguous but he has this character arc where he "grows up" and reveals how different he is from Arcturus, which should have long term consequences. It's good he keeps in this path, because it's good characters change, even if this mean they become less interesting. You can't be Wolverine forever, eventually your awesome antiheroic personality will become something else.

I just don't like the He-Man like "moral physics" of the narrative. Valerian reaps good consequences from his good intentions. I don't care he wins in the end - it doesn't need to be grim dark. He doesn't need to be corrupted by pragmatism or punished for his purity, but there are no consequences. After Covert Ops' last mission, Kate Lockwell informs the player that simply everything went back to how it was before the crisis. In The Keep Valerian tells the truth about Moebius and has no consequences for that.

And though in SC:Evolution he still acts ambiguously, which attracts disaproval from Horner (which I thought was a good move from Zahn), the timeline in the end of the book states Valerian introduced free elections in the Dominion. I don't know exactly what it means - probably not that his throne is open for contender or even that his position became symbolic. But if it means actual democracy, oh... this is very moralistic and unrealistic for a government composed of many planets that never had democracy before.

TL;DR: Val gets away with his idealism as long as he feels guilty about his father. This can be better than that.

Yeah, no. I been reading some Military Sci-fi on sale from Amazon for $1.99 including the audiobooks. So far, ALL of them have been better than what I can see Metzen having any direct influence on. These books were written by self-publishing amateurs, probably about my age.

.

You might have misunderstood me a bit. I didn't say Metzen is a good writer. I said he didn't necessarily follow the same formula that is very popular em Californian entertainment - hero must do something that is indirectly related to personal stuff, next either his learning with something helps with personal stuff or growing up in personal stuff helps to do something. Metzen's writing had many problems, don't even get me started on that, but I rather have more non-formulaic people like him trying and missing for original things than more schooled writers following formulas that are the "write way" to write stories. The antidote to Metzen's relatively weak and original plots isn't coming up with "strong", market tested ones.

Just to mention, Metzen had his own formula - "people play games to feel powerful" - that affected Blizzard storylines very negatively, too.

Don't know what books you read, but there is a big chance they're not as silly as the Hollywood hero journey formula has got.

[ragnarok]

It sort of feels like Rag is addressing a version of Kaiser's argument that I'm not sure he's making. There's a difference between every character being morally neutral and the overall narrative taking a morally neutral tone. Like the situation in Brood War where Raynor and Fenix are portrayed as wholly good characters, but they don't win, is different from a situation where all of the characters have no morals and act purely out of self-interest. And I don't know which you're arguing about.

Just speaking for myself here I thought it felt more compelling when there are a whole host of characters who are doing what they think is right, but the different visions don't line up. So like you've got Aldaris and Tassadar and Mengsk and Duke, who all think their approach is the right way.
Of course the game favors Tassadar and Raynor's points of view, but that doesn't mean that Aldaris was evil or anything. Wings of Liberty SORT OF had this kind of situation if you, as Raynor, chose not to help Hanson, where both the characters were morally good. That could have been a great moment if it wasn't so obvious that the moral choice system in that game had no narrative stakes or consequences whatsoever, and whichever you picked Hanson would just be written out of the game, never to be mentioned again, in WoL or the sequels.

This was why I hated the terran faction more in SC1 because everyone is too selfish and only cares about their own goals. For all the stupidity the Conclave represented, they at least tried to look out for the Protoss people, as did Tassadar despite going against the Conclave's ways.

In Raynor's case for WoL if you chose to side with Selendis, you can consider that playing it safe. After all, there was no guarantee Hanson's cure would even work. I'll have to check the lore again, but I don't recall cases where terran tech alone has contained the infestation so effectively.