Author Topic: EP342: Certus Per Bellum  (Read 12336 times)

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Reply #25 on: May 22, 2012, 04:29:58 PM
Makes me wonder, on a sexist sort of note ... think it has anything to do with me being male that I expected the absolute worst of him in the first place, and immediately felt sympathy for her? Rationally, I should have been surprised when it happened, and should have had a "What an idiot," feeling toward her.

A possible third interpretation:  The man offered her a deal, some kind of deal that would make dying a violent death seem preferable to living.  Such as:  her family is starving, and she has no way to feed them.  If she dies for him, he has signed a contract which will ensure that her children will be fed and cared for until they are adults.  So in that scenario she is neither a sacrificial lamb nor a naive idiot.  All we can do is speculate since we never really get to hear her story.


This story had some very interesting elements.  First and foremost, it combined a litigious legal system that reminds me of modern US culture, but with court battles resolved by old-fashioned duels but with newfangled war tech.  I've always found the idea of "justice by duel" to be a particularly ridiculous social system.  It equates physical skill at fighting with rightness, which doesn't really make any sense.  It's a terribly stupid system, both then and now.

But NOTHING HAPPENED onscreen.  They anticipated the battle.  Then the bunkers get blowed up, offscreen.  Then the fighters come for them, offscreen.  Then Bamboo launched a counterstrike that killed their enemies, offscreen.  The end.  WTF?  Can I have some of my action onscreen please?  Can my protagonist do something?  Can our supposed action hero Bamboo do something besides twiddle her Palm Pilot?  I can see a similar scene myself at a coffee shop--one person bitching about legal trouble while the other person played Angry Birds on her phone.  (Okay, so the Angry Birds won the legal battle, so it's a bit different in the result, but as far as the action happening right now it's pretty similar)



LaShawn

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Reply #26 on: May 24, 2012, 07:08:14 PM
Agreeing with what everyone said so far. While I loved Bamboo (yeah! Kickass girl lawyer. Someone make an anime of that PLEASE), the story left me unsatisfied. I thought it was more of a 'let's hash out our differences with ROBOTS BATTLING EACH OTHER', which I was all for. But when it turned out that, no, they really are trying to kill each other, the story got boring.

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Myrealana

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Reply #27 on: June 05, 2012, 02:30:18 PM
But NOTHING HAPPENED onscreen.  They anticipated the battle.  Then the bunkers get blowed up, offscreen.  Then the fighters come for them, offscreen.  Then Bamboo launched a counterstrike that killed their enemies, offscreen.  The end.  WTF?  Can I have some of my action onscreen please?  Can my protagonist do something?  Can our supposed action hero Bamboo do something besides twiddle her Palm Pilot?  I can see a similar scene myself at a coffee shop--one person bitching about legal trouble while the other person played Angry Birds on her phone.  (Okay, so the Angry Birds won the legal battle, so it's a bit different in the result, but as far as the action happening right now it's pretty similar)
Agreed. I found the concept interesting, but I thought that the characters were too distant from the action of the story. True, they were in danger, but mostly, it was Bamboo tapping on her phone, and so the conflct felt distant and unimportant.

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hardware

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Reply #28 on: July 30, 2012, 06:27:07 AM
I enjoyed this as a piece of Vorhoevenesque satire of certain trends in current society, which sort of assumes the focus on concepts rather than characters or great plot. It wasn't great literature, but I was certainly not bored either.



Fenrix

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Reply #29 on: December 05, 2012, 07:11:35 PM
Put me in the group with liking the concept more than the execution.

I was thinking the "wife" was some kind of badass assassin plant that would come take advantage of the distraction of the street gang bots. Too bad that didn't pay off. I didn't really understand why The Man utilized a strategy of a quasi-legal one-trick pony instead of throwing more resources and money into the battle. It felt artificially like a tabletop wargame where The Man spent 950 of his 1000 squad build points on the big bombs and only had 50 left over for everything else.

Also, I think the scene with Bamboo crying when her bunker is blown up was rather lame. Hasn't she been under fire before? We need a little more Vasquez and a little less Hudson.

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