I think my thinking's propably a bit polluted from Aleph's Game Theory story, so that might influence how I see this, but I saw the barriers at being somewhat dimensionally removed from normal space, but still really close. So what I meant with collapse/drift off was to let that pocket drift into the dimensional sea if just letting it dissolve/collapse would directly affect the normal space.
To me that seems like it would require more energy rather than less. Call it... gravity? The Barrier-Space wants to be Real-Space again. Shunting it off into the Dimensional Sea while possible, and may be another way the one's that preserve Real-Space from being damaged could work, sounds like it would both take more energy to accomplish and also invite a hole opening to the Dimensional Sea in the Real-Space area thanks to how the Barrier-Space and Real-Space are/would be linked.
Which still doesn't explain why Uminari wasn't on high alert for repeats of the "terror attack" that resulted from the fights in Season 1. And we're supposed to believe that the TSAB fixed the entirety of the damaged city in 1-2 days after the Nachtwal fight? And while I suppose the city-smashing Starlight Breaker can be dismissed as special effects, there's a reason you don't see movies blowing up a city and then having it all back to normal the next day. No one would believe it, which is especially important since the first movie was propaganda and needs to be believed to do its job. Or—
Ah, another Wildbow WoG that I dismiss as him talking out his ass. We're really supposed to believe that no one besides Contessa could come up with a way to organize groups of parahumans? Not a single person? Humans are social creatures; we naturally congregate, and all First World capes would be used to the idea of larger groups than five to ten. And fine, lets say shards make capes that stupid and force them to act against their natural inclinations that much (which is in opposition to another WoG that shard influence is supposed to be subtle, but that's neither here nor there). Do you know who else would have an idea to organize capes? Military and police, long-standing organizations that won't fall apart just because on cape "crosses the line". Yes, the guys Wildbow tried to say were worthless because they didn't have powers. "What about this?" one police commissioner would eventually say. "We've had all this trouble with parahuman gang-bangers, but what if we get some of those heroes out of spandex and into body armor and turn them into Super-SWAT?" And later, "One of them got a little gun-happy? If it was appropriate force, we'll stand behind him. If he really did go overboard, we'll fire him and let him stand trial, just like we do for any other officer facing these accusations." So no. Without Cauldron, the Protectorate as we know it wouldn't exist, sure, but someone somewhere would have gotten that same idea. More likely a lot of people because it's that obvious.
*sigh* Can't help but feel you're one of many who completely missed the point on that, but you're the QM, the author of this little adventure. What you say for here goes for here.
I agree with this 100%, but I'd just like to slide in one remark here:
And these parahumans are very difficult, if not impossible, to enforce rule of law on. They are one-person armies, even the 'squishy' ones. Ellisburg was the last major PRT attempt to use predominantly conventional forces against capes for a reason. And sending an org's capes after a rouge member ends in the group being further gutted by deaths/defections, shattered public trust in the organization, or both.
But they remain on the scale of the Undersiders. Small, local. Nobody's got the time/energy/resources to worry about helping the next city over, much less an entire country, when their homefront's a never-ending pile of problems.
Maybe I am, but here's the thing. First, a lot of Wildbow's WoG statements rely on the Great Man Theory, where unremarkable people don't have any real relevance; e.g., the thing about Ellisburg being the last time conventional forces were used to combat parahumans because it didn't work. I disagree with that underlying assumption (as my "talking out his ass" statement should have hinted at), so yes, any WoG like that he puts out is one I find fundamentally flawed. I could bring out examples from the quotes you gave, but honestly, I don't think I need to. What matters is that any time he says "Oh, people who aren't parahumans never would have been able to do this because la di da di da", I roll my eyes and ignore it because there is, quite frankly, probably nothing he can say that will make me believe him. Our philosophical positions are just too different.
Yes, whatever you say goes, you don't agree with Wildbow's morality and writing, we get it. Frankly, if Red Bovine hadn't said alot of what I had on my mind, but much more eloquently, I'd have just kept my mouth shut and let the topic move on. We both know you're not budging one step, so I don't want to waste everyone's time trying to push the Siberian with my bare hands. You've made up your mind, nothing I can say will change it, let's all just move on.
Hmm, that barriers themselves are not noticed, and the large scale of it suggests that the simplest explanation is that such an isolation barrier is actually an artificial and temporary pocket dimension forked on top of the combat area(think natural divergence of parallel universes, except you use magic to make it so that it forks in a limited space and that people only appear in one timeline). At the end of the effect, or when broken by force, those in the alternate space are 'dropped' back into their native timeline while the space breaks up.
IIRC, this was largely policy derived from Thinker analysis(and for Ellisberg specifically, less along the lines of "this attack will fail" and more along the lines of "Nilbog will not die quietly"). Could have been doctored.
I think that's what I said, I just took forever to get there.
Pretty much. My personal thoughts on how barriers work – admittedly derived mostly from the fact that the main organization calls itself the Time-Space Administration Bureau rather than the Dimensional Administration Bureau or some such thing – is that the spell captures what is essentially a "snapshot" of an area and then isolates that moment as time passes. Animate objects and other moving objects are excluded, leaving only objects that are stable between two points in time. This means that the mages are basically fighting in the past, and when the barrier falls, they are dropped back into the timeline where they're from. The damage remains, but it's in the past, not the present where it can hurt anybody.
Sw's gripe with that points seems to be less that conventional forces were useless(after all, even with capes they can't really do much there) and more that according to that wording, they saw Ellisburg and went "Well, that didn't work out, looks like we can't do anything about parahumans." Instead of saying "Well that didn't work out, looks like we can't do anything about Ellisburg", i.e. that conventional forces just gave up.
Should I say anything about the PRT's pre-Ellisburg success rate? Or is that going to get ignored too?
Not adding anything to the conversation.
That's kind of where I was going with my "Delay the damage" idea above, but that's mostly because... well, what happens to all that damage that occurred in the past? It sounds like either the Bounded Field is left floating there forever, like something from Grey Boy that got shunted side-ways spatially, or that the damage should have been retconned into existence... which kind of fits with the canon explanation as well come to think of it.
Sorry, but I was using SW's wording of what happened with conventional forces. Personally, I couldn't find that WoG, but it's what SW used to describe their opinion.
if that's true then where are the Langoliers
Right, sorry. Katsuragi's post a short ways above sums up how I feel about the whole 'No Wildbow WOG' attitude. But to answer your question, it's pretty much Veekie said.
Pulling Bin-Ladin style raids at best ended in pyrrhic victories, and worst got entire teams wiped. Straight-up rolling in military forces made the villains either escalate to rather horrific results or fade away until the heat went off. The PRT foam sprayer and other mass-produced Tinker-tech helped immensely, but Ellisburg showed why PRT squads are supposed to be accompanied by a squad of heroes when facing other capes. The results are not worth the human cost.
Collapsed back into the dimensional void it was pulled from. It's a temporary dimension. If anything, the dimension should COST energy to create and maintain. You never broke a real building. You broke a construct generated by the barrier.
First, I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to start or continue an argument. From the tone of your last response to me, I got the impression that's what you were thinking. I'm just stating my opinions. Whether you or anyone else agrees or not is your decision, and I don't have a problem either way.
Like I said before, Wildbow's philosophy, or at least what he put in Worm, and my personal beliefs are pretty diametrically opposed. If I accepted every WoG he put out, I would rapidly lose my enjoyment of what I did like about Worm and, more importantly to me, my enjoyment of the Worm fandom. So yes, I do ignore a lot of what he says for my own peace of mind.
I think that pocket of "past" would snap back to the past or, probably more likely, would collapse into Imaginary Space. It might also help to realize that I'm not thinking of "damage" as a measurable quantity that needs to be accounted for; it's just the rearrangement of matter, so what does it matter (
) if a wall is in one piece over here or in lots of pieces there and there and there and there and… you get the idea. I guess it's the idea that "damage" has to be transferred somewhere else at all that I find so strange.Or what's in the barrier goes to feed them when mages are done with it. Seriously, kitsune, you get a like just for the Stephen King reference.if that's true then where are the Langoliers
And he's so damn good at getting you sucked into the character's mind, it's hard for people to step out of it.
I do apologize for my own poor tone of voice. I'm really not a fan of author bashing, and that's what it came across as, to me and at least Kats. Obviously that's not what you meant at all, and I've got no issue with civil philosophical/morality disagreements, so let's indeed move on.
if that's true then where are the Langoliers
... and now I'm probably back to having those nightmares from when I was a child about those things.
Are you suggesting that they're creating the area whole-sale? Because I hope you're not. The sheer fucking mana cost to generate that would be stupidly expensive, the mana cost to pull the energy to turn into matter from the dimensional sea is much the same. I mean seriously, just what.
Yes, the same amount of mass is there, but it has been changed. It has been affected by various forms of energy and... Its not just about how much matter and energy there is, its also about where it is located. Budding astrophysicist, just... location is very important as well. I could go into an entire thing about mass being like data and simulations of the universe, but veekie's comment kinda made me spazz and wore me out.I think that pocket of "past" would snap back to the past or, probably more likely, would collapse into Imaginary Space. It might also help to realize that I'm not thinking of "damage" as a measurable quantity that needs to be accounted for; it's just the rearrangement of matter, so what does it matter (
