Joyce and Walky!

T talked yesterday about our subversion of the usual crossover teamup formula.  Like, every time two heroes or two teams of heroes meet, they fight over a misunderstanding but then realize they’re on the same side and then team up.  Every time!  You can set your watch by it.  Yo, we wanted to do that backwards.  That’s how we do.  So our guys met, got along (though with some obvious steam building underneath them throughout), but suddenly an impasse is reached and it’s fight time.  It’s what you want to see anyway, right?  Hulk/Wolverine?  Superman/Spider-Man?  Alien/Predator/Batman?  Why not put that stuff at the climax.

And this way, it’s not over a misunderstanding.  The stakes are real.

Following up on what David said yesterday: the Fans have generally refused to choose between the mission and innocent lives, sometimes to ridiculous extremes. When Rikk talked about “decisions that made good people die,” he meant by accident, not like this. Faced with the Fans’ deadliest enemy to date, a time-traveling would-be dictator who altered history to her advantage, his first response was to try to alter it himself to make the bloodiest battle of the Civil War less bloody. That didn’t work out.

Even committing to a plan to kill just that dictator– who had killed and would kill millions– was almost more of a sin against the sanctity of life than Rikk could handle. The others don’t always agree with him on specifics, but they do look to him for overall moral leadership, certainly more than they trust any government agency.

They win their “roll for initiative,” with two exceptions. Jackie, as the newest, has not yet learned what it means when Rikk glances like that, and Mike is almost always ready to mix it up with somebody, on general principle.