SlickRiptide

Actually, we don't have the first clue what's going on inside of Shalice's head. Malaise was stopped and killed, sure. Shalice was prevented from being locked up inside of her own mind while Faux Aurora took over (and the whole Faux Aurora thing has to be one of the dumbest plot devices ever) but we have no idea what Faux Aurora is doing to Shalice, given this apparent multiple personality disorder that Shalice has. There's no guarantee that the woman who awakens from the coma will be Shalice Tilman. My expectation is that it won't be. (Of course, a psychiatrist/psychologist might well say that the woman who woke up at the conclusion of Calvin Scott's story was not "Shalice Tilman" either. The real Shalice would be the whole personality created from the merger of "Shalice" and "Aurora".)

It will be a long stretch to count this as much of a victory.

I found it highly amusing (that is to say, I was highly annoyed) when the chapter three contact informed me that I was going to receive a commendation for my efforts. WTF? Seriously, Agent Kwahu? An honorary medal? I didn't realize that they handed out medals for royally f---ing up and letting a signature hero get murdered by a crackpot dictator.

But, oh, right; I should take solace in the fact that it's not my fault because there was nothing I could do...

Touche.

My real problem with the demand for conclusive evidence is that Xanatos is one of the old timers around here and he knows that if the evidence he demands ever actually existed that it's almost certainly lost to time and the vagaries of forum moderation, pruning, and changes in software.

Barring Arcanaville having 8-year-old email to back up her analysis, or Matt Miller reading this thread and somehow finding it intriguing enough to respond to it personally, or Jack Emmert or Sean Fish or Rick Dakkan or some other original dev revealing that they are playing Freedom and then posting their recollections, that conclusive evidence does not exist. Since he will accept no amount of analysis, deduction or induction as valid evidence, q.e.d, he wins.

I don't respect that stance, especially given that Arcanaville is pretty much as close as you're going to get to a non-dev who is also an expert on the game from both a mechanical and a historical standpoint, and Xanatos likewise knows that as well.

Yes, but if you're going to expect people to understand you reasonably instead of pedantically then you have a burden to behave reasonably instead of pedantically yourself, which is really the point in all of this. Xanatos was behaving unreasonably while expressing his belief that his behavior was, in fact, reasonable.

Plus, if you're going to invoke logic then you had better have a sound logical argument, IMO instead of an argument that demonstrates that you aren't actually arguing logically at all.

If I say "The sun will come up tomorrow" and I present overwhelming evidence that the sun has come up every day for the past 4.5 billion years, and you say "I won't believe it unless I see it come up with my own eyes" then you're being unreasonable.

Heck, the study of history has way more to do with inference, hearsay, and deduction than it has to do with indisputable facts taken from the horse's mouth, so to speak. You might as well say that historical study can tell us nothing useful unless you hear it directly from the historical figures involved. "Prove it conclusively", would eliminate most of the historical record from the past several thousand years from contention as "legitimate" evidence.

I'm not sure what you intend the word "destruction" to mean in this context, but none of the statements require a burden of proof because they are simple statements about what you believe. There is no doubt that you believe them, regardless of the truth or falsehood of the belief. They're axioms.

Xanatos was picking on Arcana's wording saying "You can't say 'I believe X'", because X is unprovable" without either demonstrating that X is unprovable or by explaining why Arcana was incapable of holding an unprovable belief. I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. I cannot prove empirically that it will actually happen, but that does not make my belief in it any less true.

Xanatos chose a petty thing to get all pedantic about, without actually proving the logic that he seemed to be actually espousing, because he waved his hands and claimed that his own logic did not require proof for magical and indeterminate reasons, or just because he didn't feel like providing any. "You can't prove your stance 100% empirically to a standard that I accept, therefore I win. Unless I hear Jack Emmert himself say it, you lose."

Heh. While I'd like to think there's a cool explanation, I think this might well be the correct one.

Well, let's say that I see those extra straps making it less fashionable instead of more fashionable. If fashion was the primary motivator I'd expect them to be dispensed with entirely for both looks and freedom of movement. Never mind the ability to mix and match coordinates.

Good point! I blame the two beers going on three...

Touche!

I'm actually sympathetic to this viewpoint. If it was just the jacket, I'd probably let it go. It's not just the jacket, though. It's the costume pattern taken as a whole.

You know how Batman eventually justified the bat logo on his chest as a distraction to encourage criminals to attack the part of his body that was most heavily armored?

Penny has created a big bullseye over the most sensitive parts of her anatomy.

Maybe she's just that good at psychic defense that she doesn't care.

If that's what you took away from it then I'd say you missed the point. Nobody is really saying that a bare midriff is risque. Teen Penny has an exposed midriff. Nobody looks at her and says "Oooo, sexy!"

The bare midriff is not the point, at all.

Firstly, let's dispense with "underwear on the outside" when talking about Superman-style of uniforms. That's a modern-day schtick. His uniform was created in the 1930's when nobody at all would have thought of it was "underwear on the outside" and any WOMAN wearing something that looked like underwear would have been viewed as a vixen, at best.

Superman and the heroes who copied him are based on a circus strongman's outfit. The shorts (not underwear) are a caricature of the clothes worn by body-builders even today and the tights was just an excuse to make him look muscular while still having him be less-than-naked.

A golden-age heroine's costume would never look like "underwear on the outside". It would have been inspired by a one-piece swimsuit or an evening gown and more likely to have a skirt than to have any piece that was obviously meant to look like panties.

Penny's outfit looks just fine when drawn that way, as some of the photoshopped examples in this thread show.

Is she risque? No, not really. Is she gratuitous? Yes, most definitely. The question is, "Why?". What's the point of drawing that attention, to the point that they even paint her panties on her trousers?

I say "they" because Penny is a fictional character and ultimately some designer at Paragon Studios is the one who made this decision.

She wears a uniform made of some shiny, apparently rubber-like material that one assumes is intended to be protection of some sort. Why then have an exposed, unprotected midriff? That seems downright silly. I assume the weird belt holds up her pants in much the way a garter belt holds up stockings. Seems like a clumsy arrangement,really.

However, teen Penny also wears a short jacket. Maybe she just likes the feel of air on her belly. *shrug*

"Underwear on the outside" serves a purpose, however antiquated, on the Superman-inspired styles and it was never intended sexually, nor would it have been perceived that way by the people who were initially exposed to it. The circus strong man style would have been well-known and recognized for what it was.

I don't think you can find any examples of a woman wearing a lingerie-style of clothing that doesn't involve at least a deliberate display of her assets, when it doesn't involve outright intent to pander to male sexual desire. If you can name any, I'll be interested to hear of them.

A character like Swan has her place in the pantheon. She's a Victoria's Secret hero. That's fine and dandy because she doesn't make any bones about it. In fact, there's a certain intimidation factor from dressing like that - a criminal who is accosted by a hero in nothing but lingerie has to ask himself what defenses this hero has that he's not seeing.

Penny's outfit is basically pandering. She's wearing a protective uniform that covers her up and that could have had thousands of different patterns imposed onto it that would have been cool and unique. Instead, the pattern that was chosen was to literally paint her underwear onto her uniform since we couldn't see it under the uniform.

If anything, the one thing that actually offends me about the design is not the sexuality of it. It's the idea in some graphic designer's head that the only way that I, the player, can recognize this character as female and appreciate her as female is to spell it out and clobber me over the head with it, as if I'm too stupid or loutish to appreciate anything other than lingerie on a woman.

I imagine that Penny must be really stuck on Golden Age/Silver Age comic book heroes given that none of her most likely role models are of the "underwear on the outside" variety.

In any case, the circus strongman look has a very specific cultural origin. Penny's look is like literally wearing your underwear on the outside. "My outfit didn't look like Swan's so I just put Swan's clothes on over the top."

Let me ask you this - War Witch wears a corset, pretty much, on her upper body, but she wears pants on her lower half, and the corset is very much colored as part of the whole outfit. It's not given a contrasting color or highlighted in some way that says "Hey, Look! These are BREASTS that I'm covering!"

What would your impression of War Witch be if you had opened that first issue of CoH and she had been wearing a dayglow corset and a bikini brief instead of pants? Would you feel the same way about her as you do today? Would you view her activities in the comic quite the same way?

You can't divorce a hero entirely from their appearance. I had this very forcibly brought home to me when I happened across a painting of Wonder Woman by some modern comic artist or another. Her uniform had been converted from the classic depiction into something that resembled a very tight, very small swimsuit that left almost nothing to the imagination. It technically had all the details of the classic uniform and could be said to be "appropriate" if one felt like arguing about it, but there was no question that it was intended to evoke a sexual response in the viewer. (I'm not sure the details are appropriate to the forum, but let's say that the lower body coverage was scanty.)

Clearly, this is not nearly as extreme as that, but in a way it's even worse. Penny's uniform covers up all of her "naughty bits" and then tries to purposely draw attention to them anyway, as if she somehow can't be recognized as a female person unless we have it hammered into our heads that, yes, she has all of the appropriately gendered bits underneath the rubber suit.

Well, one person's gratuitous sexuality is another person's terrific costume design. YMMV.

One thing I am rather curious about is that backpack, fuel tank thingy with the pipes coming out of it. I suppose that it could be some sort of travel power since we've never actually seen her levitate (yet).

Well, the problem I have (and it's honestly not some huge big problem, just a feeling kind of like when you have a niece you haven't seen for five years and when you do see her, she's suddenly a lot more woman than you were prepared to acknowledge in contrast to your memories of an immature, sweet kid) is that it's this character. If it was on some character I didn't know or care about, or if it was a character who was an adult from the "get go" then I wouldn't really make much of a comment about it.

Since she IS wearing a one-piece jacket, why have an ersatz bra/bodice/corset painted onto it, or a bikini brief painted onto the pants? They don't serve any purpose except to shout "Even though you can't see anything, we still want you to IMAGINE things."

Yeah, maybe it's because she grows up off-screen, or because you can still go to Faultline and visit teen Penny, but either way it just feels a bit slimy to be looking at at her as a "sexy" character.

***EDIT***
Eighteen? There's no way that Faultline Penelope looks or acts eighteen. I always figured her for about fourteen.

Okay, after some more fiddling with photoshop, I'm going to concede that one. It looks more like she has a bare midriff and the visual artifacts I was looking at were just visual aritifacts.

No, that isn't what I mean. I agree with you, that the upper-body bit is a jacket or something designed to resemble a jacket.

The zipper doesn't stop at the bottom of the jacket. It extends all the way down past the top of the "bikini brief". If you enlarge the photo, you can see the line (or at least the visual artifacts from drawing a light-colored line onto light-colored material) connecting the "jacket" zipper with the identical line on her briefs.

That suggests that the whole outfit is one piece with a zipper for entry/exit. That sounds like a flexible suit of some sort, not some kind of body armor.