META: Comic Book Tropes You Loathe

[Tom Russell]

On Apr 19, 5:41 pm, Saxon Brenton <saxonbren... at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Dvandom replied to Easily Discovered Man Lite:
>
> > Except for, naturally, Cannon Fodder. And then there's Sig.Lad, who may
> > or may not be dead, depending on how you define it. And under certain
> > definitions of death, Kopikat has died numerous times, replaced in each
> > instance by someone with her memories. :) Squid Boy sort of died and came
> > back thanks to Suicide Squid.
>
> > Unless, of course, you mean just your own LNH stories.
>
> With respect, there's an entire *type* of resurrection - the Editorially
> mandated resurrection - that is alien to the setup of the Legion of
> Net.Heroes, or any of the other story imprints on RACC.  We don't have
> any characters who are corporation-owned money-spinners who need to be
> kept in the public eye in order to keep the action figure lines selling
> and the copyrights active.  When *we* resurrect our characters in
> annoying ways, it's either because we're playing with the story tropes,
> or because we're being drooling fanboys :-)

An excellent point.  Not counting my tyro years-- basically, anything
before Net.Heroes on Parade is stuffed to the brim with stupid deaths
and resurrections-- I'm pretty sure I've only brought a character back
twice, and both times it was partially playing with tropes and
partially a drooling fanboy thing. :-)

Tyler Bridge was "killed" by Chatillon in Net.Heroes on Parade-- issue
seventeen or eighteen-- and then came back at the end of that arc.  I
put "killed" in quotation marks not because it didn't happen, but
because the circumstances of Tyler's existence were peculiar-- being,
that is, a full-on walks-through-walls ghost, so he was kind of dead
already.  He had come back as a ghost the first time around when he
was miserable and friendless; now, the second time around, he had
friends, people that he cared for and that Chatillon had put in
danger.  When he returns, he says something like, "I came back when I
had nothing to come back for, did you really think I wouldn't now that
I have do?"  I still like that moment an awful lot-- sure, it's
didactic and perhaps even a little emo, but I still really like it,
and most of (the revised) NHOP as a whole.

And then in JOLT CITY Dani Handler was presumed dead and trapped
between dimensions.  She was presumed dead in number nine, Martin knew
she was still alive in number ten, and in eleven he rescued her-- in
addition to escaping from an escape-proof supervillain prison,
crippling Darkhorse, deducing Derek's secret identity, and thwarting
the Apelantian invasion.  As you can tell, that story was meant to be
something of what TV Tropes would call a Crowning Moment of Awesome,
and the resurrection was definitely meant to be a part of that.

Otherwise, I think I've kept dead characters dead, and in my Eightfold
work I've stayed away from ghosts/confirmations-that-there's-anything-
beyond-our-physical-existence.

==Tom