...and now for something completely different:

The FLGS, Part1 - The Old Days

There was a discussion topic  on EN World recently about the future of gaming stores and coming out of that I thought it was worth discussing here. I've seen definite changes since I got into this whole thing and I am curious about where things will go next.

When I started getting interested at the end of the 70's I don't recall any dedicated game stores. There were Hobby Shops, usually located in a mall, and they carried a lot of different things (models, model rockets, RC cars, model trains) including those early D&D books and modules. There were also mall toy stores and they too tended to have a grown-up games isle that included D&D and Avalon Hill titles like Panzerblitz and Squad Leader. You could occasionally find game stuff in other places - I bought my first D&D Basic Set at a Kmart - but it was mainly smaller mall type stores in my experience. During this time I moved from Tennessee to Florida and found the same thing there - toy stores and hobby shops were the main venue for finding new games. I also spent time in San Antonio and we soon moved to D/FW. In the early 80's in Texas this was still mostly the same state of affairs but the new wrinkle was that you could find a lot of TSR products in Toys R Us and Target.

Throughout the 80's the mall hobby shop ("Hobbies for Dad and Lad") was my main FLGS though we did start to see comic book shops popping up (Lone Star Comics, Fantastic Worlds, others) in shopping centers and those started to add a game section too. They were still branded as comic book shops but the game angle kept growing. Local comic/sci-fi/fantasy conventions started adding more game events too and that drew the comic book shops in even more. One big difference vs. today was that I never saw people playing in a store in the early days - you might talk to people and hang out for a while, but nobody was playing in the stores and there wasn't space dedicated to it. There were occasional demo days where a company would bring in someone to show a game in the store, but there were not groups of people playing on their own. I remember Yaquinto bringing in a bunch of games to the hobby shop above and getting a lot of interest, but the big showy stuff and tournaments were left for the conventions.

The first game I remember making a splash in local stores was Battletech. It looked like a lot of early anime shows that were getting popular, it was smaller scale but had a lot of visual appeal with stand-up figures (and later miniatures) and the boxed game gave a lot of room to expand by having construction rules in the book. Stores started showing it with demo games in the storeand also started  running tournaments for it at local cons and it was really the first popular "everybody plays that" game that I was aware of, much like X-Wing today.

By the 90's I started to see dedicated game stores opening up (Heroes, Games Plus, Game Chest) and even stores with a more comic book focus (Generation X) started to set aside play space for gamers. In the Time Before Magic this was mainly miniatures games like 40K, Space Marine, Star Fleet Battles, and Battletech. I saw a few RPG's played in a store, but they never seemed to be the bulk of the action. Then in the mid-90's Magic took over, with an assist from Pokemon, and it was card game tournaments, card game new releases, card game expansions, and a lot of the other games were squeezed into a corner or out of the playing space altogether. There might still be a D&D night but it was on a set night when it wouldn't interfere with the new hotness. It makes sense - someone might buy a new D&D book once a month, but kids were in there buying cards damn near every day. I also found that during the 90's most of the mall stores moved out of the malls or just died off, maybe because of the new wave of dedicated game stores.

Game Chest in Valley View Mall - the store has been gone for a few years now and the mall itself isn't far behind ...

The turn of the millennium and the release of D&D 3E was when I saw noticeable jump in the number of RPG's being played at stores. Magic had calmed down a bit, miniatures had a steady place in stores once again, and there was enough interest and excitement to set aside some D&D time. Other games started to creep in too but D&D was the one I saw most, maybe because of the organized play efforts with Living Greyhawk.

That's sort of where I see things today - a mix of dedicated game stores and comic book shops, usually in a shopping center, almost all with some playing space, and for most card games (mainly Magic) are the lifeblood product. It's been a fun run, but what does the future hold?

Rifts for Savage Worlds - We have a date!

Two Weeks!

I have to say I'm pretty happy to see that logo and that image combined. I think we will get to pay more attention to the setting with a decent system that's a lot less tied up in mechanics and one that plays a lot faster than what we've had for the last 26 years. It's definitely a chocolate meets peanut butter kind of development for me.

I'm slightly less happy to see that it's another Kickstarter but Pinnacle has delivered on every single one and they've run quite a few these last few years. For some reason I was thinking this would be a traditional release which they still do occasionally. The kickstarter will get plenty of attention and probably let them do more with it than the traditional approach but it means a month of escalating hype and stretch goals and I don't get quite as excited about that as I used to.

Anyway I'll be getting on board for this one and I'm looking forward to seeing what Savage Worlds can do with the Megaverse.

Well, I'm interested ...

...just get it out there!

Random Comic Reviews - Avengers: The Initiative

After the events of Civil War, with all of the heroes being registered, the idea was to have a government-sanctioned team of superheroes in every state.

The first thing that occurred to me: cool idea, right? If you were living in a universe with a bunch of super types running around, why not try to organize them? Seems totally logical to me.

The second thing that occurred to me: We only have 32 NFL teams and they struggle to maintain a pro-level of talent.They do have a much larger roster though. How about the NBA? They have 5 starters plus bench players for a total of 13 or so but there are only 30 NBA teams. So, depending on how common superpowers are in the universe, it might be feasible to have 50 5-10 man teams.

Back to the book: It ran for 35 issues + an annual, so about 3 years from 2007 to 2010.

So what about it? Well, I'll tell you - this is a terrible series. I was thinking we would be seeing the veteran Avengers training up a new generation of heroes - after all it does say "Avengers" in the title and one of them had the cover picture shown above. Nope! The only well-known Avengers in most of the run are Hank Pym in Yellowjacket mode who is in charge of the whole thing and War Machine who drops in for short runs. The main scientific genius in residence is "Baron Von Blitzschlag" a leftover Nazi scientist and also a totally new character made up just for this series who is treated as if he has some widely known history! He's totally not a cliche! The drill instructor is Gauntlet, another new character it appears we are supposed to know though he had all of one appearance before this series starts. So we have a command staff that's largely new characters training a bunch of new heroes, neither of which you probably care about a whole lot before the book begins and unfortunately you probably won't care much more after reading the 36 issues of this series.

Right in the first issue there's a training accident and one of the new recruits gets his head blown off and he's not the type of hero where it's going to grow back. Does everyone admit what happened and clear it up? No, where would the fun be in that? It's covered up by the dirty politician, the uncertain drill sergeant, and the former Nazi. The new recruits don't like it, but hey, they go along with it.

Most of the series is like this - a bad mix of dark and boring centered around a bunch of characters you don't know that well and don't care about all that much. Unimaginative names, unimaginative costumes, and so many new heroes showing up that they have to label them in the panel when they come in - there's not much good here.

One example: Komodo. I think we're supposed to care about her because when she doesn't have her powers turned on she reverts to her human form - and she has no legs. That's different and could be an interesting angle but I thought it wasn't used all that greatly throughout the series. I'll let Spider-man explain:

He's right - her signature power in the book is that she charges in with a team, gets an arm blown off, then complains while it grows back in a panel or three.She has no special skills or knowledge, she just regenerates lost limbs in seconds and doesn't like going back to her human form. Keep in mind this is one of the more interesting recruits. Most of them are even less memorable than she is. Most of them are more like "Armory"

Guess what her power is? She has a really big gun stuck on her arm. An alien gun, one strong enough to take out Ultimo in one shot! Her gun-arm is in the story more than she is and we learn very little about her other than this.

There are various sub plots about Baron Nazi cloning people and feeling all fatherly towards them, and various cover-ups and the resultant guilt that comes from them, but it is nothing special. There's a bunch of follow-up on the New Warriors if you care what happens to them after Civil War.  The series' best moments come when it's part of one of the big events: World War Hulk, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign, and Siege. There is very little momentum for the series as a standalone book outside of these. Speaking of Secret Invasion ...

One of the new recruits is named "Trauma" and his power is to take the form of an opponent's greatest fear. That's pretty cool as far as a directed shapeshift power goes and they do explore it somewhat before they go off the deep end on his parentage but aside from that ... this Hank Pym is later revealed to be a skrull. The "real" Hank Pym, upon his return, notes that he never set foot in the training camp. So why is skrull-Pym's greatest fear a battered Janet van Dyne? I'm sure the internet had a field day with this kind of thing when it was happening but I wasn't paying attention just then so I'm raising my questions now.

Why would a skrull-Pym need Xanax for somethign he didn't do, as the returned "real" Pym later acknowledges that yes, that was him that did that. So even if the skrull-Pym knows about the history, he didn't do it and wouldn't feel bad if he did! If you're going to claim the glory of "we've been setting it up for a long time" then it seems you should also own up to it when there are holes and it's typical that this book has a big one.

I thought the best issue of the whole series was one where Taskmaster (who becomes the head trainer partway through the run) finds himself getting promoted beyond his comfort zone.

I don't particularly care about Taskmaster but he's been around forever and shown up in a lot of stories so it's interesting to see the world from his point of view as a 3rd-tier mercenary type villain. Especially when he gets bumped up to the big big leagues and realizes he doesn't fit in.

It's probably fitting that the most interesting part of this particular Avengers title is when it gives a villain's point of view.

One other note: You might expect some humor or banter in a modern superhero team book. It's part of what makes the Marvel movies enjoyable, and I've seen it in books in the past, so I was kind of expecting to see some here. Well there's not much - it's all deadly serious. Even with a bunch of f the characters being teenagers with superpowers there's not a lot of lightness. That's another big thing that I felt was a let down here.

Overall I never felt like the series was adding much of anything to the Marvel universe. It introduces a ton of new characters and most of them get lost in the crowd. It does nothing on it's own plot-wise to really stand out. Most team books focus on a team - this one focuses on a hero training camp and once a hero graduates they don't show up as much because they're all scattered around the country to different teams. Even the staff isn't consistent as they are transferred and replaced. Old characters do drop in and out but there's no real ongoing story. Finally, the art styles change dramatically back and forth throughout the run and the series has no real "look" to call its own. I had hoped this would be something new and different and interesting and well, "different" isn't always good.

If you've been wondering about this one, I wouldn't bother reading it as its own story. Read the big events instead and you will hit the high points of the Initiative as part of those.

Super Saturday - Random Comic Reviews: The Introduction

Sometimes I get an itch to go back and read a comic book run that I missed.  There's plenty to work with as I missed a lot of the Marvel and DC events from the last ten years or so. I am generally aware of what happened in most of them, but I didn't read them and with all of the animated shows & movies turning up on Netflix, the live action shows on the networks, and the big movies I thought it was time to go back to the source material. I am making a slow but continuing effort to catch up and as I do, I figure I might as well post my thoughts on them here.

Since there will likely be plenty of these kinds of posts in the near future here is my background - there are 4 long boxes in my closet:

• One is a nearly complete run of Iron Man from about Issue 100 to about issue 300
• One is a bunch of 80's-90's Avengers comics
• One is a nearly complete run of West Coast Avengers
• One is a bunch of 80's - 90's X-Men acquired somewhat by accident but still worth keeping

I've owned quite a few others over the years but these are the one's that stuck and formed the core of my formative years. Beyond them I was there when Secret Wars was new, when Crisis on Infinite Earths was breaking up DC's universe, and when the Ninja Turtles were a fairly dark black and white indie book.I was an on and off comic book guy from the late 70's to the early 90's so the 80's is my chronological sweet spot, with Marvel as my general discipline, and the Avengers and their related books as my specialization.

I'm not a snob about it - I have read some Marvel and Indie stuff recently and intend to catch up on my DC gaps as well. Over the last few years I started paying attention again and went back to Avengers Disassembled, the New Avengers, and Civil War with side trips to Planet Hulk and Annihilation. I also tried to keep up with DC's New 52 but dropped out after about a year.  For this exploration of history I've gone electronic unless I can find cheap trades.

Now this exploration will not just be the newer stuff - there were a lot of books I did not follow closely even in the 80's. I also have an idea about trying to read, say, all of the Superman or Batman books from, the year I was born onward.  It's a tall order but it should be fun. More to come!

40K Friday - March & April

We have been playing our miniatures games and I have not posted much about them for some reason.

• The Reign of the Eldar continues
• Apprentice Blaster and I are still building and painting (or in his case "repairing" after the cat got into his room and took a strong interest in giving his space elves the old American Tourister luggage test ). 
• We played another battle over Spring Break (3000 points of Apprentice Red's Orks vs. a combined Eldar force of 1500 each for me and Blaster) a few weeks ago and recorded video of it as a first attempt at maybe doing a series of video batreps. We will see what comes of that. 
• I finally managed to get my wraithknight built, if not painted, and it performed very well. This weekend I might have time to get some painting done on it leaving only the Spiritseer unfinished out of the whole Wraith Host formation.
• Supplemental: I finally acquired a hard copy of the Dark Eldar codex. I know they're not that popular right now on their own but they make damn fine allies for an Eldar army and I intend to expand my force as time, money, and the painting backlog permit.

• Kings of War
• I picked up that second unit of boarboyz I wanted but have not had time to build or paint them yet. My orc army is pretty much complete for now I just need to base everything permanently and get to painting. 
• Apprentice Blaster's High Elves are also complete - he just needs to build too. He did get his own rulebook so he's all set there. 
• Apprentice Red is also starting to work on his Wood Elves and figuring out how to adapt them to the game. He's going to use either the Elf or the Nature list as his core.

• Command and Colors Ancients
• While not strictly miniatures it has been scratching the ancients itch and we've actually been playing regularly which really makes me happy. Our standard approach now is to set up, pick sides, play the game, then switch sides and play again. It is a lot of fun and it plays fast enough that this is completely possible in just an hour or two for most scenarios.
• We have most of the Ancients sets and we also have Memoir 44 but I like this system enough I've actually considered getting the Napoleon game and previously my interest in Napoleonic games was right about zero. I may wait until we've plowed through more of the ancient scenarios but I am surprised to say I am seriously thinking about doing it.

Daredevil Season Two

Being honest here, I never cared that much about Daredevil in the comics. In the Marvel family tree I mainly read the Avengers branch titles with a side trip into their licensed stuff (Micronauts, Shogun Warriors, Godzilla) and some of the oddities (Devil Dinosaur!) and an occasional step  over to the X-Men branch. I never really got into the New York Street Level Heroes branch where DD and Power Man and Iron Fist lived. I heard some good things about the Frank Miller years but I didn't really care about the street level scene. This has remained true up til now - I've read maybe two DD comics in my life and I believe those were part of crossovers. He hasn't ever been much in the RPG's or videogames so I've never taken an interest. Given that background you can imagine my surprise at how good this show has turned out to be.

 Upon further review I think DD is a great choice for  TV show because while you need plenty of stuntmen you do not need a ton of CGI because he's just a guy. No fancy powers, no fancy armor, he doesn't fly or shoot lasers out of anything. heck, he's lower maintenance than Batman as he doesn't have a car or a plane or a Batcave. A costume, some sticks, and an apartment are about it. It's a small-scale superhero story - he's not fighting alien invaders or frost giants. He is beating up thugs and gangsters. While Supergirl and the Flash need to accommodate the hero's powers, plus their allies' powers, plus the alien/meta/dimensional invaders powers, DD really just needs some guys with guns, plus maybe some knives, baseball bats, and maybe some nunchuks. So far that has let them put their resources into other things and make a really good show.

Season One is really good. We get the origin, we get friends, we get the day job, we get a serious main opponent for our hero, and we get a pretty solid resolution to the major story arcs, making for a nice complete season.

Season Two picks up some time later and some logical consequences from events in the first season are popping up - mainly other vigilante types, some of whom do not share the same "subdue and arrest" philosophy of our hero.  The Punisher is the initial focus of this and it is really well done.

That's saying something, because I've never cared about the Punisher as a character either. If I've ever read a Punisher comic it was only because it was part of some larger crossover event and I may have seen one of the movies but he's not the kind of character I care about following as a superhero. Despite that I really like having him in this show. He's the darker reflection of DD and brings an extra level of "the real world" into the story and setting.

I'd say Season 2 Episode 3 is where this peaks for me. It's a classic Bronze Age vs. Iron Age debate if you want to frame it in those terms, and it's the best confrontation I have seen on TV about killing vs. not killing for superhero type characters. It is really well done and it leads into an extended fight sequence that is as cool as anything I've seen in any of the other Super-shows or movies that are out right now.

As the season progresses we get more than just Punisher - Elektra shows up, then Ninjas (so many ninjas!), then Stick returns. Stick was my favorite guest star in Season 1 so it's nice to see Scott Glenn joining back up for an extended visit.

The show as a whole is an interesting study in non-super superheroics. Matt Murdock is not a billionaire playboy - he has a day job. No one on the show is invulnerable or has super-healing. Spending your nights out getting into fights has consequences and the show does a really good job of highlighting them. Bad decisions are made pretty regularly on this show and not just by the bad guys and they do not just disappear - fallout from those bad decisions sticks around. Keeping secrets and not showing up for work threatens careers and relationships.

Beyond the moral issues the fight scenes are really well done and you can "feel" every punch and kick  so I'll say the sound work is well done too. The story, characters, and plots are all solid and in some cases a lot more than that. The season is 13 episodes long and I didn't feel like any of them were filler so the pacing is well done too.

It is at the very least PG-13 and after one particularly intense prison fight we decided to tell the 13 year old "no" on this one. If you want to watch superheroes with the younger kids Flash and Supergirl are much better suited for that. I would say save this one for the older teenagers and the grown-ups.

If you have Netflix and haven't watched it yet I'd say get going. If you don't have Netflix this is a pretty good reason to give it a try.

The Rogue One Trailer is Out

Just go type Rogue One Trailer into YouTube if you haven't seen it yet. It's worth it. The music, the rebel base, the grimy X-Wings ...

I have to say that it looks right. No idea about the story or the acting or the characters but the thing looks good to me at this point.

Badass #1 - "Samurai Guy" - it appears the stormtroopers are being foiled by another melee guy and this isn't even a lightsaber!

Badass #2 - "Imperial Lord Whitecape" - it's always been TarkinTarkinTarkin when it comes to building the Death Star, so who is this guy?

Regardless he is clearly not bothered by carnage or mudpuddles.

Mystery Figure - looks pretty sith-y but who is he?

Badass #3 - She's the lead, but is she undercover here or turned or what?

Something's different about the antenna on this Star Destroyer. Some kind of special ship? Or are they all going to be like this?

Yeah! AT-ATs in the South Pacific! Why does a walker beach invasion seem so cool? not sure, but it does.

Already looking forward to this one!

Batman vs. Superman

(Yes, there are spoilers here)

Introduction
What a cool idea for a movie! What if, instead of yet another new villain, two of the good guys we know and love from multiple movies opposed each other instead? Awesome, right? Well ... not exactly.

First off, this Batman is a new interpretation of the character, 20 years into his crime fighting career. It's not a strict follow on to the Christian Bale Batman or the Michael Keaton Batman or the animated Batman or any other Batman that we know. The origin story is the same (we see it in the opening of the movie) but we don't see much about the decades since.

Superman is the Superman from Man of Steel so we have at least met him. It's not the traditional optimistic Superman though. He doesn't seem to have changed much since the last movie but people are building statues of him so he seems to be liked at least, if not loved.


The Prequel
I went back and watched Man of Steel again before seeing this movie. I had not watched it since it was in the theater and I wanted to refresh my memory of it. I like to think I am open to different interpretations of comic book superheroes because we get them all the time with different writers and artists and storylines anyway, not to mention when they jump to animation or live action shows or movies. This movie is definitely a different take on the Superman story. I'm OK with about the first half of it other than thinking Krypton looks pretty drab for an advanced society. The biggest break point for me is Superman's earth-dad, Johnathan Kent. In every other interpretation of Superman, Pa Kent is a classic midwest American farmer, an optimistic man who thinks his adopted son was sent here for a reason, to make a difference. In Man of Steel he debates out loud whether his son should have let a school bus full of children die to preserve his secret identity. This, the attitude of his earth dad, is the single biggest point of divergence in the movie and sets up a very different kind of Superman. Can you imagine the Christopher Reeve Pa Kent, Glenn Ford, having that conversation with his son? How about the Lois and Clark dad? How about Bo Duke as superman's dad in Smallville? How about the animated Superman dad? I can't. I thought the 90's were the decade of paranoia and government conspiracies in popular media and we get a sort of 90's take on the character here.

B vs. S
Moving on to the sequel, I'm fine with the general debate over can-the-super-powerful-alien-be-trusted - that's the kind of thing a comic book movie should examine! I'm fine with Batman having a problem with him, as within the context of the setting he has a decent case to be upset. So plot-wise I like the concept. The plot takes quite a while to develop. Normally I am fine with a movie taking time to set things up with the assumption that there is a big payoff in the end. That's where this movie starts to fail though.

We have machinations by Luthor, but we never really get an explanation of why. Why does Luthor want to do the things he does? It needs to be more than "he's crazy" because a) he's built a major corporate empire so something is working in that brain and b) we have other villains to cover "crazy". You chose Luthor to be the major driver behind this - tell us why! In the comic books his motivation is typically are either revenge or jealousy and I didn't get either of those from this movie.

Plot-wise we also have the problem of a bait and switch. Batman does take on Superman, and beats him! Then he's derailed by a really strange coincidence - not "strange" in that someone else in the world is named Martha but "strange" in the sense that that alone would break him out of a killing rage. I can accept it but it seems weak to me and that a little more effort should have been spent on this crucial turning point of the movie. It is critical, CRITICAL, to sell this moment, that after two hours of single-minded pursuit of the goal of ending Superman, the thing that turns them into allies needs to be 100% believable, and for me this level was not achieved and I find myself going with "well it is a movie" and rolling with it.

So we have two hours of driving towards a particular destination - the clash of Batman and Superman - which is resolved in one fight sequence. But we're not out of movie yet! We take a turn in a completely different direction where they are now allies and have a problem to solve and a new opponent to defeat. These last 20-30 minutes of the movie have very little to do with the rest of the plot. it feels like the result of a conversation along the lines of "we don't have enough fighting in here so what could we do for a big finale" - was "Batman vs. Superman" not enough?! Could you not make a movie that was exactly that and have a big finale? "Superman seems to be dead" was where things ended up anyway - could that not have been done through the promised confrontation?

The movie also has to set up the Justice League thing so somehow we end up with the origin of the  Avengers. That's right - several known heroes come together to stop a raging, seemingly unstoppable menace and decide to keep working together. That's exactly what we get here with Doomsday vs. our heroes. So nice job on that.

Characters:

• I like the idea of somewhat world-weary, cynical, Batman Year Twenty. He clearly doesn't care about some things anymore - the World's Greatest Detective sneaks off to plant a device in Luthor's tech room and gets seen by at least 3 people, one of whom beats him back to retrieve it. Bruce seems to care more about the punching than the sneaking at this point. He also seems pretty fine with using guns. Also remember when Bruce Wayne was supposed to be the lightweight cover identity, sort of the opposite of Batman? that's nowhere in sight here. Affleck plays him the same - "Batman" is just a costume, not a separate personality, and Bruce Wayne looks and acts like someone who's spent two decades on the police force, not as a billionaire playboy.
• This Superman is just not something I like. I think Henry Cavil looks the part, I think the costume looks great, but the character is just not what I want or expect from Superman. For all the talk about "hope" he doesn't seem to have or inspire much. He's much more Thor on a bad day than traditional Superman here. I could take the cold superior Superman a little easier if there seemed to be much growth or change but I don't see it. Oh and the guest-appearance by his earth dad is once again completely wrong for the character: "I once did something heroic but it turned out that I hurt some other people and I had nightmares about it for years" - yeah, thanks dad, thanks for that little motivational moment. This character would be less damaged if the ship he arrived in had landed on dad than he is by having Costner-dad around giving him advice.     
• Wonder Woman - well we don't get to know much about her. I like the attitude when she's fighting at the end, but that's about it.
• Lois Lane - there's just not much here. I like Amy Adams, but I can't really think of anything distinctive about this Lois, and that's after two movies. Margot Kidder's Lois was memoriable, this one is not.
• Alfred - does Alfred hate Bruce Wayne in this movie? He seems more like a disgruntled employee hanging on for his pension than a concerned parental figure. From Alan Napier to Michael Gough to Michael Caine I've been pretty happy with almost every portrayal of the butler but this one just doesn't seem to like much about what he's doing.
• Luthor - I didn't hate the portrayal like I thought I would after the trailers but it is very different. That said, I could see a place for this version of Lex in the long run if they could back off of the crazy somewhat. "Eccentric evil genius" could work. Plus I need a motivation.

In the end, no I didn't like it as much as I wish I had. I could live with the plot hiccups if the characters were ... better. The characterizations were where it really fell down for me. yes, different interpretations and all but if you don't want to make a movie about the characters as they are best-known, why are you making a movie about Batman and Superman?

I saw some chatter online about how it would be cool if they were secretly making a Justice Lords movie and the more I thought about it, the more I like that idea. It would answer every complaint I have about the characters. Can't you see the Justice Lords Superman originating with the kind of dad he has in these movies? I can. Plus it would give some hope that at some point the "true" version of these characters are going to show up and set things right.