Kargath]Go back and read the previous page of the chat thread wrote:
Firstly, watch the personal remarks, they reflect poorly on you in general and amount to little more than an eyesore.
Secondly: it doesn't matter. The degree of these things is completely irrelevant because the problem with having a God character extends much deeper than just what's done with them: it has to do with a narrative tone, an infringement of the rules, and the general fairness with which two battlers treat each other. This will be treated much more specifically at the bottom of my post, so hold off on what attacking tirade you have until then.
I forgot one word there: "probably". I of course have no idea what Erdawn will write in his posts, what tricks he has up his sleeve, so that was a tangetial statement of the two most probable outcomes at the time.
Irrelevant. Knowing that Erdawn would act again you still presented the most likely scenarios as being equivalent to him never acting again at all, which is tantamount to saying that what he does doesn't matter.
Yet again I must state it does take effort for Lucille to make changes, and it takes time.
Even assuming that more complex changes take more time to make (which is something that's never indicated in the fight, in the introduction, or in the tone of your narrative, so I find it particularly doubtful, but more on that at the bottom), there's no indication that it takes Lucille any effort at all to do anything; that is to say, no more effort than it takes to speak, which isn't very much at all.
Take your head out of your arse for a minute and think.
How about you actually try to discuss something without resorting to petty epithets? I'm going to assume that's not too much to ask.
If Lucille could just appear and fix everything with a single word, then why the hell is she persisting sticking around possibly the single most dangerous character in that world-story?
She's not. Every post you make illustrates that she isn't bothering to stick around him at all - that at any given moment Richter is on the edge of ceasing to exist, and that this is of course inevitable and his best bet would be to just lie back and take it. Again, not acceptable.
Are you even thinking about character knowledge here?
Irrelevant. My character not knowing that killing yours will kill him doesn't change the fact that you've built a "safeguard" into your character that means that, in order to keep consistent with the universe you established, your character can't be killed without the consequences for everybody else being much worse. That's inherently cheap, whether Richter or Wyborn or Reiko or Aidan or any
character thinks so, and if you don't see anything cheap in it then you need to sit back and possibly reconsider what the word means.
What would you say if your opponent says "Don't kill me or your universe will fracture and cease to exist"?
"That's cheap and I'm going to ignore it."
Ironically enough?
Erdawn said and acted on the exact same thing.
There's a damn good chance the character will think Lucille's talking out of her arse and keep fighting. Hell, even if they do take Lucille seriously, would they even care? What if Lucille was fighting Terror? He'd just go "THANKS FOR SAVING ME THE TRIP!" and begin slaughterfication. ]
Character knowledge is irrelevant. This is not a contest to see who has the inherently better-built character, it is at its worst a contest between the two writers to see who can operate within the bounds of the rules and triumph over the other person. That's the BF at its most primitive and boorish, but it's also good for reflecting on what it is that makes Lucille cheap. More on that, again, at the bottom of the post.
It's not about how characters will react to Lucille, Kargath: it's about how
we, the other authors, do.
As for the question of "surviving" against Lucille:
If a tree dies in the forest, and is alive the moment someone looks, was it ever really dead?
Allow me to answer that with another quote from you, not in the quote format so it can be visually seperate. This is what set me off in the first place, mind you, so it's fairly relevant.
"If Richter knew the consequences of killing Lucille (ie
his permanent death and the fracturing of his entire story and the probable fracturing of all other stories in the Book due to lack of maitenance), would he still do it, I wonder?"
Italics and bold for emphsis: mine.
Doesn't matter if Richter knows. The only way to get around that is to pretend you never said it, and it's ridiculous that you created a scenario so slanted in favor of yourself that Erdawn had to ignore that part of it (and I know he did because I know he saw that particular line of your post) altogether.
If we have to pretend part of the scenario you created doesn't exist, as in we can't incorporate it into our own narrative, it doesn't belong. You can't place yourself in a state of godhood.
For ****'s sake, think.
Suggestion: calm down. Go for a walk. Perhaps have a nice glass of cold juice.
If your opponent can change the universe through Words, break their jaw and rip their tongue out. That's a flagrantly obvious counter, and I'm actually quite surprised Erdawn didn't take that route.
Neverminding the fact that there's never any reason to believe that the somatic components of the universe-bending are actually integral to the process of retroactively rewriting history.
Wait, can't "never mind" that.
The reason for not healing her lower wound, or truly healing herself is that organic structures are ****ing complex. Do you really think that Richter would just stand around whilst Lucy chants herself back to health?
That excuse is laughable. You not only changed Lucille's nervous system so subtly that she no longer felt pain while retaining complete control of her motor functions, you did so retroactively throughout the course of three
billion years, across gulfs of time so vast the human imagination boggles at trying to imagine them on a reasonable scale.
If you want to tell me that fixing your guts is more complicated than
that - even if "had never felt pain" was referring to only twenty seconds, it's still retroactively rewriting history - then I'm going to have to ask you to explain to me how this could possibly be so.
I'm sick of you - your refusal to read what I say,
I wonder where you get this idea.
your refusal to countenance some other literary device other than vanilla magic to accomplish changes in the environment and characters,
Vanilla magic? What in the Hell are you talking about?
Like ripping out the leylines of reality and using them to bind a ready-to-be-born universe, keeping a Big Bang from occuring
in the midst of said eruption?
Like disintegrating the outline of an opponent's life aura using the nature of their own attack combined with an already-displayed, level-playing-field aspect of your own?
I mean, what does vanilla magic even
mean?
your refusal to think.
I'm actually unsure about how to take that - should I
laugh? Obviously not, but I can't take this seriously.
To me it just seems like you're outraged that I put up a fight
Then it's not me who's not reading what his opponent is saying. I'm outraged because the way you constructed your character and the scenario of this battle would normally preclude a fight altogether - if it weren't for Erdawn's tendency to go berserk at that kind of thing and shove the universe up the ass of opponents who don't play properly, there would not have been a contest. And that, frankly, is taking things too far.
- and I refuse to throw a fight just to satisfy your whims, Wyborn.
The implication that I want you to throw the fight is ridiculous: all I want to
see is a fight that takes place within the rules of the battlefield, which Lucille literally makes impossible.
OK, let's make it nice and simple for you.
I hope that at some point you realize addressing me like that doesn't do anything but show your ass, which is to say your poor temper.
It is true that given enough time, Lucille would be able to reshape an entire universe to her whims.
Inaccurate representation of the character: she can retroactively change actions and existences in time, so not only could she change reality, she could make it so that the former version of it had never existed in the first place.
That and, and repster will appreciate this, that power is so easy to exploit in a Dungeons and Dragons way it's almost pathetic.
Let's suppose that Lucille retroactively changes things so that she took a different action - this is a lot smaller than bringing things retroactively into and out of existence, like a book that's suddenly been falling since before Lucille was instated to look after existence, so there's no reason that she couldn't. Now let's pretend she changed it so that she keeps making an increasingly larger series of changes to her own actions - compounding them by an extra twenty seconds or so with every cycle, going a little further back each time. Each time she changes thing she can compound the changes in any way she wants.
Bam. Without effort and using up no "real time" as perceived by the readers or other characters, Lucille has changed it so that she has been preparing for the arrival of Richter for minutes, or hours, or days, or years - it doesn't matter how long because any degree of change is easily within her power, because she can do it retroactively. Something akin to this is done with the ammunition of Richter's gun and the book - made to exist long before it was written - that fell onto his head.
That is quite probably the cheapest character I've ever described, and I ended my part in "Wytos" by shattering the fabric of a universe and sending neighboring ones spinning off into oblivion. Difference here? I never pretended to greater power than my enemy: we escalated at the same rate and stayed on the same level, so it was fair and fun as well as intensely stupid.
Lucille is not a fair character, and the need to deal with her in such a specific way means she's not fun, either.
However, this will never happen.
Irrelevant. Has nothing to do with the innate cheapness of the character.
Factor one: it is not her will. She would never reshape a universe for her own amusement, all she does is minor corrections to return to a pre-ordained plot path.
Irrelevant. Character intent has nothing to do with the innate cheapness of the concept of a character who can warp the fabric of time and space simply by willing it - or articulating her will to do so.
Something I learned years back, and that you're going to have to learn too if you want to operate properly on this battlefield, is that nobody likes a character vaunted by the author as completely outclassing the opponent, save that they would "never use the full extent of their abilities". It's cheap, it's boring, it's insulting, it's
against the rules.
If the old, Wytos-era Terror fought a Pikachu or Harry Potter?
They would be assumed to be at an equal level of destructive potential for the sake of the fight. That's not what happened here. That's why you broke the rules. That's why Lucille is not acceptable.
Factor two (battle specific): Your opponent starts chanting in unidentafiable words that go beyond your eardrums and into your mind. Things around you start disappearing and shifting. Do you wait for her to finish and see what happens? I wouldn't, and I think it's fair to say Richter wouldn't either.
Again, irrelevant: character intent has nothing to do with it.
It takes a simple Word or two to make a book, or a rock. The process increases in complexity and time for more complex issues, such as organic structures. Now, can you imagine how long it would take to fix a googol of air molecules and their direction vectors, erase living things and restore them with their mind waveforms intact, all at the same time?
