LNH20: Earth-Twenty Roundup Thread And Getting The New Tag In There

[Lalo Martins]

quoth Andrew Perron as of Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:53:45 +0000:

> On Nov 10, 5:57 am, Lalo Martins <lalo.mart... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> quoth Andrew Perron as of Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:12:36 +0000:
> 
> <snip>
>> > LNHers:
> 
> <the snipster!>
>> Pantra.
> 
> Do we want to tweak her name a bit?  I've always been vaguely
> uncomfortable about it being only one letter off from the name of a
> character who was so similar and so thoroughly removed from general use.
> (Of course, *her* name was only one letter off from one of the actual
> copyrighted characters she was a parody of, but that might just make it
> worse...)

Personally I don't mind that much. It falls into the case of too much 
soundalike stuff to matter. Pantra ended up being a very, very different 
character from Panta; we established the relation because we figured, 
ironically, Pantra was kind of true to the reputation that Panta unfairly 
acquired; she was from the start designed to be violent, promiscuous, 
foul-mouthed, and with a very short attention span. As for the name, I'll 
quote Pantha, Panthro, and, of course, the panther. In fact, we created 
her before we knew Panta had ever existed, and when we did, we though it 
would be funny to make that connection. In the 20verse, there's no 
connection, the way she was originally conceived.

>> And I'm open to Minority Miss being an LNHer if other writers think
>> she's a good fit, I just don't have any story ideas for her.
> 
> Hmmmm!  To make her more usable, let's streamline her powers: She has
> any power that exactly one other member of the LNH has.
> 
> (Indeed, you could tie this in to the origin of the LNH: The New LNH
> Member Detector decided that they didn't have enough of certain powers,
> so it somehow *changed* the powers of a new applicant.)

I don't know. “Exactly one” nerfs her a bit much (no flight?!?) and makes 
her pretty much Substitute Lad. “At least one” makes her too powerful.

In fact I don't care that much about her powers, it's more her 
personality and what she stands for (the mandatory token minority 
character, just as many minorities as possible). And that's one reason I 
don't want to write her: I think as it is she's more interesting as a +1 
in group/task-force stories than as a main character.

What about we give her a simple, powerful, but extremely boring power 
set: flight, strength, resistance, energy blasts. She's an Utility.

>> Since we haven't heard from Saxon about using ARAK, I'll propose a new
>> character: Obsessive Archive Lad. Some inspiration from Kid Recap and
>> ARAK, but characterization focused primarily on archive.org, and also
>> the curator of the Trophy Hall. I guess he probably has powers, but I'm
>> a bit in too much of a hurry to figure out what they are (really should
>> be in the office already).
> 
> Hmmmm.  Methinks this is the kind of thing Saxon would be interested in,
> and he's just busy and unable to tackle the ridiculous number of posts
> (187 so far in November alone!).  So I don't want to step on his toes if
> he does want to bring ARAK in.
> 
> That said, a character like this would be useful.  How about... ah! My
> planned revamp of Library Lad could step in here.  I'll make a post on
> that...

What I want is a character to narrate the flashbacks in the flashback 
title. Kid Recap would be the Classic LNH choice, I guess.

We could also go the obvious route and call him Flashback. His power is 
visually projecting memories. Very useful in court until the Supreme 
Court ruled that violates the 4th Amendment or something, at which point 
he retired to the LNHQ to curate the Trophy Hall. Probably still called 
upon for the occasional interrogation.

>> [villainous snip]
>> > Questions:
>> > * Which characters are members of the Five Years Earlier LNH - that
>> > is, founding members?
>>
>> Pantra is definitely a noob. I could imagine MM being a founder, even
>> though it requires a different origin story. And the good Professor.
> 
> With the backstory idea I put above, I'd say MM would be one of the
> first new members after the team came together.  The Professor could be
> a founder; depends on his backstory, I suppose.

With the powers and metatextual intent I put above, she pretty much *has* 
to be a founding member ;-) a minority-free LNH would be a Bad Thing 
Indeed (says Mr. Victor Stone).

-- Lalo “politically concrete” Martins