LNH20: Generation 2.0 #5

[Martin Phipps]

On Jan 2, 2:41 pm, "Adrian J. McClure" <lord_sold... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Googlemesh isn't the LNH Setup Kid. He's someone else (I thought I'd
> told Lalo who, but back during the planning stages I sent so many
> emails to so many different people I wouldn't be surprised if I lost
> track), but it'll take me a while to set up his story properly. From
> Lalo's brainstorming, I was under the impression that Googlemesh's
> battle with ApocaLISP was what created Netropolis. Of course,
> Googlemesh is a god (or two-thirds god at least), so he could have an
> interesting relationship with time, existing in the never-ending
> battle with ApocaLISP outside of time while also inhabiting the
> timestream in the present.

It's confusing.  Sorry about that.  My understanding was that the
"ancient legion" was legendary and that people didn't know LNH HQ was
in Netropolis until it showed up after the killfile.  Presumably
they'd be mainly Native American legends although Greeks, Romans and
Nordics could all have come in contact with them and hence the legends
of Zeus, Hercules, Odin, Thor, Olympus, Asgard, etc.  Any battles they
fought would have been from that time period before people kept
written histories.  I also assume there would have been a lot of them
because they were a "legion".  Presumably something happened to them
and they disappeared when LNH HQ disappeared (long before Europeans
came over).

> Anyway, about this story: I enjoyed it a lot, more than the previous
> issues. In the first couple issues I didn't really get a sense of the
> characters, even though Martin had very strong basic concepts for
> them; they all seemed generic in the story itself. I still don't
> really have a sense of Jay and May's personalities. They also didn't
> really have a lot to them.

I know Jay is a problem.  The fact is that I have met a lot of people
like him.  It is possible that his English isn't as good as his
sister's so he doesn't say much.  Logically then they should be
speaking Vietnamese to each other.  I never said they came to the U.S.
as babies.

> This issue also opens up some interesting avenues for worldbuilding. I
> was surprised by the idea that the Legion spread into other dimensions
> from this one. I wonder whether this is actually the LNH originated
> from, and the various LNHQ seeds grew from this one.

Hmm.  I hadn't thought of that.  I basically wanted to explain what
happened to the rest of the legion and the idea of "a hundred
different threats from a hundred different worlds" requiring the
Legion to break into a hundred small subgroups and spread themselves
over the hundred realms was simple hand waving.  (Of course, the idea
of gods being able to travel to different realms sounds a lot like
Norse mythology.)

> Also, I very much doubt that the Trolls are entirely dead. They're too
> useful for stories for that. No doubt some of them are alive in
> Ava.LAN, and would make things very complicated for the LNH should
> they ever go there.

I considered having more trolls but I thought it would get pretty
silly pretty quickly.  This one troll covered a lot of different kinds
of trolling (insulting, agitating, being a kook, being an egoist).

> Having Googlemesh on the Legion creates other
> interesting difficulties as well. Even though Googlemesh seems to have
> mellowed down considerably since his days of mass rape and mindless
> killing (if the Epic of Gilgamesh is anything to go by), I suspect
> he'd still have difficulty adjusting to the idea that descendants of
> gods like him have to live under the law of ordinary human beings. The
> rest of the Legion would have a lot of difficulty keeping him in
> check. He may be "the first hero," but by modern standards he could
> very well be considered a net.villain.

Exactly.  That's why I think this is the real Googlemesh.  In Sumerian
mythology (legends?) Gilgamesh went to (presumably) Lebanon and
attacked (read "invaded") and started cutting down cedar trees and
took them back to Sumer (Iraq).  He would have been a great hero to
his people but, really, he was the equivalent of Saddam Hussein.
Googlemesh wouldn't have hesitated to kill trolls if trolls were a
threat to humanity.

Martin