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[Matariki Rain]

There's a point at which game worlds stop being places I want to explore. Eve has reached that point for me.

Bother.

[Aria Jenneth]

The PF reveals are interesting.

There are two things about TonyG that make me reluctant to read T1. First, there's his taste for melodrama. Second, there's his shoddy approach to canon.

Vendrin made the argument that TonyG's work is PF, so suck it up and accept it. I'd be more sympathetic to that point of view if TonyG's own work didn't regularly contradict the same canon he's contributing to.

Essentially, where TonyG is in agreement with other canon, I'll buy that he's telling it like it is. Where TonyG contradicts other canon, I'll presume the other canon is correct. Where TonyG is beyond other canon, I'll buy that he's telling it like it is until someone else contradicts him, at which point I'll go with the somebody else.

Now if only I could bring myself to actually read this stuff.

Also, if only somebody would put Tibus Heth out of our misery. He's served his purpose, dammit, and unlike every one of the other annoyingly prima donna NPCs, he's a historical and cultural anomally. There's not a single faction (no, not even the Patriots, at least as of the faction update that accompanied TEA) that's actually happy to have him leading the State. He's an obvious assassination target, ideally as an apparent martyr in the struggle against the Gallente.

Have a bunch of Gallentean-speaking guys with Gallentean black ops gear vaporize his head with a Roden Armaments-made particle blaster. Bury the rest of him with the highest honors, and have the CEP officially proclaim that because Tibus Heth was truly one of a kind and no one else can be said to be worthy of such honor, the position of Dictator shall remain forever his and his alone (and consequently vacant).

Get back to business.

Bring on the Lai Dai false flag op! Let's get on with it, already!

[Silver Night]

I'd say that actually the only faction that didn't get a deus ex machina type random leader/set of oligarchs/whatever well outside of historical and cultural bounds was the Gallente.

As far as templar one, if it really is better written than EA, I might have to give it a shot. I literally could not stand Tony G's writing for long enough to get more than about a tenth through EA. On the other hand, I'm tempted to pretend Tony G never happened and just hope for better treatment of the PF in the future.

[Aria Jenneth]

Well-- the Empress is an empress, even if she's kinda weird.

Shakor is a long-standing tribalist figure and rival to the former president. Is there something odd going on there outside the Elders?

Tibus Heth is the Dictator of a culture that doesn't customarily "do" individual leaders with sweeping authority over everybody, at least not in the last century or three.

The first is part of the system (anomalous person, not anomalous position). The second was just waiting to happen. The third is a populist rebel playing overlord to a bunch of elitist corporate elites who hate the very idea of a dictator and are all, as far as I can gather, grinding their teeth down to nubs as they try to be patient when what they really want is to do away with him. If he can survive in that context, he really is a paragon-- and the PF around him to date that I'm aware of hasn't portrayed him as remotely superhuman.

The Caldari are quite capable of being aggressive and militaristic on their own without the help of an autocratic Milosevic-wannabe, and I would dearly appreciate it if CCP would let them. The CEP is less "personal" about it all than Heth is, but that's the Caldari all over, no?

[Silver Night]

Yeah, I see your point. I think the Elders were pretty out of left field, though. As far as the empress, well, it is implied that one of the reasons that the Amarr have some of the best cybernetics is that they put a lot of research into it to extend the lives of emperors, because the have such a deep aversion to cloning them - then suddenly, oops, nope, nevermind, it's fine. (Jamyl was publicly killed at the succession trials, after all.)

Heth probably is, though, in terms of overall not making sense in the context of the culture involved the worst offender. He has what I think is the most ridiculous of the 'stories' about coming to power, etc. Basically EA is when I found myself drifting away from a previously intense interest in Eve's backstory, and why I have something of an aversion for the idea of buying T1.

[Aria Jenneth]

Ah, yes. The Clone Empress.

That's one I actually think they set up pretty well. Okay, sure, she's back from the dead in a world where the only way people come back from the dead is via cloning. Occam's Razor, she's a clone.

... That's if anybody dares to publicly apply Occam's Razor.

We're talking about a very, very religious society, one that believes in miracles and basically looks on battleships as cathedrals and lasers as the light twinkling through stained glass windows. Combat against the heathen is a sacred act. This society, riven with internal strife and discord, ruled over by a functional usurper (a certain dead Sani, ah, Chamberlain, was it?), finds itself under siege by a terrifyingly well-armed and well-prepared enemy, one capable of posing an existential threat to the Empire. (That may not be the reality, but considering the havoc the Elders wreaked, you can see how panic would start to spread.)

At the climactic moment of the conflict, a vision of godly power: a battleship piloted by a long-dead Imperial Heir swoops onto the battlefield and crushes the foes of God and empire in a single, swift stroke.

"Well, that's awfully convenient," say the skeptics.

"Silence, blasphemer!" pant the immensely relieved faithful. "This is an angel from God, sent to our rescue! Didn't you notice she just saved our bacon?"

"Still mighty convenient," mutter the skeptics, but bite their tongues lest they find them cut off-- and, in any case, the idea that somebody might have set the Elders up for Jamyl to blow up comes off horribly conspiracy-theory-ish.

So, Occam's Razor applied with a heaping helping of faith and general gratitude at not being overrun by barbarians: it's a miracle! God has raised Jamyl Sarum, granting her flesh once more, and armed her with divine weapons! You don't get more "Godflesh" -ish than flesh literally given you by God.

At a certain point, that's the simpler answer.

[Gottii]

Yanno, if everyone wanted to make a gentlemans agreement that TonyG never happened, wouldnt break my heart none.

[Ken]

Yanno, if everyone wanted to make a gentlemans agreement that TonyG never happened, wouldnt break my heart none.

I thought this was simply done.

[Mathra Hiede]

Yanno, if everyone wanted to make a gentlemans agreement that TonyG never happened, wouldnt break my heart none.

I thought this was simply done.

Pretty much this, its an un-written rule you just ignore TonyG in a very Gentlemans agreement way... at least thats what I have seen from pretty much everyone I know

[Safai]

This seems to be the general consensus. And as much as a huge part of me wants to read them, I have opted to simply leave these books alone to easier pretend they do not exist should I find I dislike them.

Sad, really

* Safai just made his first and probably last post in a Tony G topic

[Aria Jenneth]

With the exception of what's been in the IC news reports?

... Yeah, I'm pretty much good with treating the TonyG books as being to Eve what Tom Clancy novels are to RL.

[lallara zhuul]

The problem with ignoring TonyG is the fact that the game world conforms to his idiotic whim.

Ignore the world, become insane in the eyes of your peers.

[Publius Valerius]

The problem with ignoring TonyG is the fact that the game world conforms to his idiotic whim.

Ignore the world, become insane in the eyes of your peers.

Not in my eyes.

[Aria Jenneth]

The problem with ignoring TonyG is the fact that the game world conforms to his idiotic whim.

Ignore the world, become insane in the eyes of your peers.

Actually, it's easier to come across sane by ignoring TonyG than the opposite. TonyG wrote his novels about things that go on behind the scenes of the Eve universe. The typical capsuleer should know little to nothing about them beyond what makes it into the news.

Failing to ignore TonyG for purposes of your regular RP will make you look like a crazed conspiracy theorist. Aria's been known to indulge in the occasional far-fetched round of speculation, herself, but Aria has no way of knowing the "truth" and I like my theories better anyway.

Read and embrace the news and chronicles. Ignore TonyG. It all comes out nice.

[lallara zhuul]

The problem is that his whims have shaped New Eden.

The very real leaders of the factions are his making.

The Faction Warfare is there by his reasoning.

Even though his writing is something that describes what happens behind the scenes it does not change the fact that none of the leaders that were put in place in the cluster by his stories make sense when you look at the way New Eden was portrayed before him.

He did not just put unbelievable characters at the helm of all the empires.

He rewrote the rules that ran New Eden.

Before TonyG you could take the PF at face value and use it as a source to give you guidelines on logical patterns that would compose a fictional reality that would follow laws of causality.

Giving the roleplayers a possibility to spend hours upon hours on speculating on how different cultures evolved into what they were and what kind of different branches of social evolution within those cultures could thrive without being decimated by the dominant one.

Before the laws of causality were broken by TonyG you could use common sense and current scientific development as basis of exploring a living breathing New Eden with your imagination and you could share it with others without magical handwaving or social cliques to justify your views.

Even before TonyG players spent ages waiting for glacial movements by the CCPs storyline folk to show that New Eden was alive outside of the day to day life of a capsuleer, but you could safely hypothesize and extrapolate.

The world was malleable within a frame, it was truly a sandbox as a game and as a world.

When the laws of causality were turned into a deus ex machina that could be broken at a whim so that the Grand Story of New Eden could be told as a Space Opera That It Was Supposed To Be, it all fell apart.

Now there is nothing to build from, because everything can be destroyed at the drop of a hat from someone working for CCP.

The Amarrians can suddenly start wearing Hot Pink speedos because some cackling storyline boss decides its so.
The Gallente can start eating babies, just because it is so.
The Caldari can secretly all be cyborgs.
The Minmatari can be nanite enhanced pornstars that club enemy ships to death with their phalluses.

It's just Meh.