The question presents itself: why didn't The Green Lantern just carry around a certain amount of paint, some colour other than yellow?
He wouldn't even have needed to... like... carry around a can of paint with a green-powered boxing glove.
Maybe just a utility belt of paint. I'm sure Batman would've hooked him up.
"You need... whacha need on this, Hal? Grappling hook? Shark repellent? Emergency raft?"
"Nah... just a lot of... paint, Bruce. Any colour but yellow."
"Just paint?"
"Yeah, like.... paint. Spray paint would be nice. Supercompressed paint so that, like, I could have a lot of it? Even better."
"...but just paint."
"Yeah. Paint."
"...can it at least be BLACK paint? It's sorta my... thing."
"Black ain't yellow, that's all that matters."
"Awesome."
These days, there's some sort of complicated explanation of the yellow weakness involving an immortal yellow fear demon that lives trapped in the main power source of the Green Lanterns and... overcoming it by overcoming fear and then the power works on anything which... seems about as creatively interesting as Superman being able to overcome kryptonite if enough of the children in the audience clap their hands but... like... perhaps I'm old and cynical now.
Comics have re-written their realities so many times that now they're, like, putting all the goofy crap from the 50s and 60s back in... just in needlessly complicated ways that make them awkwardly fit into a more "real" world. If you wanna take out all the goofy stuff and create a hard-science-fiction kinda take on the superhero thing, fine. If you wanna take a wacky child-like fantasy take on the whole superhero thing, fine as well.
But when you do your once-a-decade total reboot... you know... pick one.
Don't go like "Green Lanterns are weak against yellow? That's dumb." and then, like, say "Well, it still happened but there's this demon Parallax and, like, it took over the Green Lantern for a while and tried to destroy the world and... HE was in the power thing forever, we just never mentioned him and... now he's back in the battery and rookie Green Lanterns are weak against yellow because of his connection to the colour and... etc."
If it's dumb, you just reset your universe, throw it out. Don't make up some long weird confusing thing that manages to BOTH piss off old readers AND confuse new ones. If a million colours of kryptonite are dumb, write 'em out, don't... say that there's only the usual stuff and then slowly... Batman invents red kryptonite again and then Mr. Mixedpickles magics blue kryptonite back into reality and on and on.
If it's dumb and you don't want dumb, you can write it out.
Don't... try and smart dumb up just enough where it's too smart for people who want dumb and too confusingly arbitrary for people who want smart. Because I'm still gonna say "Well, why don't the ROOKIE Green Lanterns just carry around paint?" and we're back at square one, guys. Seriously.
Anyway... for some reason, it's very funny to me that the child otter confuses Iceland with Switzerland.
I've no idea why.
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Topic: 20 October 2006 - Can knights disagree with policemen? (Read 4538 times)