Krayzikk

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

1000 fam

@HereComesTheSnow

o o o f

my philosophy paper was nearly twice as long

this'll be an exercise in minimalism

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Guys, these electric puns are getting out of hand. Let's keep things grounded, alright?

That said, Onarax nailed my thoughts and intentions pretty well earlier, so. I'm going to redirect my energy towards getting a post done and the new contest.

EDIT: Almost forgot. @Write, the contest outline mentions a word limit but I think I missed the actual limit. What is it?

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

<Snipped quote by Krayzikk>

I don't understand how you can maintain that I messed up and miscommunicated my methods but aren't a bad judge because of it, and that the winners wouldn't be any different, and that it's not my fault. If I had better standards and communication, then people would have had a better idea what to expect, and some of the people who I disqualified could have ranked anywhere among the top places. Because of the fault, my results are invalidated. It's like getting mad at people for arriving late to a meeting when it was my watch that was fast.

@Lugubrious

Because what you intended was clear, to you. And clearly a lot of people did understand what you wanted. Some people, who went for something a little different, just misinterpreted the exact parameters. The standards are flawed, but your judging based on them was perfectly fine. It's less that your watch specifically was out of synch, and more that everyone agreed on a time but not everyone's watches were set to the same time. So some people showed up early, some people showed up right on time, and a few people narrowly missed the mark.

A little more clarity for the future would be fantastic. But completely retallying the results (in my opinion) isn't necessary.

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Well, screw me then, am I right? If both trusty Kray and the contest winner disagree with my standards (bad standards make a bad judge and make my decisions bad ones) then it's not just one person's malcontent. I mean, forget the idea that I might have preferred those with greater antagonistic force in a story than those with next to none, and that both Grane and Diamond both had shreds of good left in them. Also forget that this RP has been Darker and Edgier since the very beginning. The contest results are now voided; if I get another three hour span free in the next couple of weeks I'll go back and try and sort everything out less 'questionably'. Alternative, someone less questionable could step up to judge the whole contest. Please--be my guest.

@Lugubrious

Little of that is what I meant; I've said from the very beginning that I would have chosen very similar winners. Napoli and Gratia were both far and away the best entries into the contest, by my standards and yours. Even my third and fourth place winners would have been similar, were I the judge for the contest.

I never said you were a bad judge, either. In fact I never even said anything about your judgement in this contest. I said something because there was clearly a difference in standards between what you intended and what some people interpreted from the contest descriptor. I only started talking about the standards after the fact because, to be perfectly frank, I was irritated. While you had a very clear idea of what constituted a villain or bad guy in your head, it didn't match up with what the literary definitions were. And since the literary ones were the standards I (and I suspect a few others) had been working off of, it seemed as though my entry was within the parameters of the contest.

It isn't a matter of you being a bad judge, it's a matter of a miscommunication in what the standards for the contest were. If you still want to void the results and reconsider, go right ahead. But that outcome was not my intent, nor do I think it's what Onarax was looking for when he agreed with me. We both had been discussing the literary definitions of villain prior to his agreement, so I think he was endorsing my objections to the standards.

Like I said, it isn't anyone's fault. It's a case of something being lost between intent and interpretation. Hence my original feedback on perhaps being able to define things a little more clearly for the future. And in fairness to PoS, Onarax and I both were missing the last paragraph for a little while. I think the coding that would give his name a mention didn't work, so it tends to blend in with the feedback on other entries.

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

By the metric of this contest at least half the villains of the Metal Gear franchise are not actual villains.

@Silvan Haven

Roman Torchwick is a nice guy, and Cinder has literally done nothing wrong. And the White Fang are anti-heroes.

By all the standards used here.

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

<Snipped quote by Krayzikk>

I took the term 'bad guy' as the deciding factor here. To me, bad guy is not debatable; to have bad as the main qualifier, you've got to be doing so much bad that the label envelops the character. This isn't Wreck-it Ralph. To be on the opposing side isn't enough, and to accomplish good things in bad ways is to be degrees of an anti-hero. The reason Grane qualified is because he hasn't accomplished anything good, and it's up to real debate whether or not he ever will. That's part of the tragedy. It makes him a bad guy; all the great things that Ben has done for people make him a good guy with a bad rap by some people. If I want evil, I'd rather have an evil character than just evil methods. I'll admit that evil is a broad term, and murderlusting serial killers have a place there at one end of the spectrum, but I'm not at all, I don't think, encouraging a generic standard. The top five entries were all unique, despite the fact that they all killed people.

As for you bringing up the canon...why? Our contests are something that's non-canon in a non-canon fan work of an actual thing. The most creative liberties can be taken here.

I'm sorry my judging style didn't appeal to you. I can't give a real metric of what I like and don't like, and the limited scope of what I ask for compared to the massive spectrum of what I got. I could only draw the line in the sand after combing the beach. If that makes me suck as a judge, so be it, but if nobody makes a contest for a month, I'll be the one that does it, and people have only to not participate to make me stop.

@Lugubrious

I'm not saying you're a bad judge, but your apparent standards...

Do not match up with what "villain" or "bad guy" means at all. A villain or a bad guy is not someone for whom being evil is their sole defining characteristic, and a villain for whom "evil" is the most notable character trait is a really poor villain. Villains and bad guys are the antagonistic force in their respective work of fiction, and that means that the relative morality of a setting (and the morality of its heroes) are what defines the line between being a "good guy" and being a "bad guy".

This is the definition of a villain;

a character in a story, movie, etc., who does bad things

: a person who does bad things

: someone or something that is blamed for a particular problem or difficulty

Wreck-It-Ralph follows these definitions to a tee; all of the "villains" are just villains because that's their job. The movie's actual villain, and the only one that actually constitutes a villainous influence, falls on the opposite end of the line between a setting's good and evil forces.

Gratia is a fantastic entry. At the same time, she could qualify as the villain in a setting like Game of Thrones. In RWBY, she would be a monster to such a degree that she would never even make it onto the show. Napoli could be the Designated Evil Teammate in a dark enough setting. Emerald, meanwhile, would be a light and soft enough villain that she could feasibly be used in a kid's show.

By your standards, a villain needs to be completely evil; beyond any measure of good left in them. Hell, if you call "doing good things in bad ways" an Anti-Hero, the White Fang are Anti-Heroes.

What defines a villain is their status as the antagonistic force in a story. What could be a villain in RWBY could be a saint in Game of Thrones. I mention RWBY canon because RWBY is, fundamentally, a black and white morality setting. Anything that grows too dark, like the White Fang, are villainous forces; they oppose the protagonists with evil methods. Every one of the entries, by the metric of a fundamentally black and white setting, is villainous.

I have no complaints about the winners selected; but I honestly have every complaint about the standards of the contest, given that every entry fell within the parameters offered up in the contest descriptor. To disqualify an entry because they're "not bad enough", when by the standards of the game so far and the show this game is based on they're all well past the line of "antagonistic", is... Pretty questionable.

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Congratulations to all the winners, and I'm not really surprised by the selections made. You all did a fantastic job. I'd go more in depth, but for about half of you I did that ages ago. =P

That said, I do have a mild objection. I saw several people (I think I counted three, including myself) that were largely disqualified from consideration because they "weren't enough of a bad guy". Now, this might seem a little odd given that the contest was to make a villainous version of our characters... But that's just it. Neither the term "bad guy" nor "villain" actually denote a degree of evil. Even the more detailed aspects of the contest overview didn't provide an indicator of "must be this evil to qualify".

Both villain and bad guy simply refer to the antagonistic force with evil methods of a given work of fiction. In fact, every entry in the entire contest was significantly more evil than every canon RWBY villain. Ben (who I use as an example only because I'm the most familiar with him), by all accounts intended as an Anti-Villain, kills people. There are only two antagonists in RWBY with an existent death tally, and that tally amounts to one person.

I suppose my complaint is that the contest descriptor only really indicated that we should be making the villain of a story, and villains aren't inherently mass murdering mentally unstable people. Mass murdering mentally unstable people qualify, beyond a shadow of a doubt, as villains; but so do characters with goals and personalities that, were it not for their methods, would easily be on the side of the angels.

In the future, it'd be nice if we could know to what degree we're supposed to do something. There are characters with significantly less evil methods that were considered, while some with evil methods but nobler goals weren't deemed villainous enough. It'd be nice to know for the future so I, and others, don't have to default to the generic extreme just so we can be sure we meet the standards.

Because by the definitions given, every entry was villainous. It just seems like there was a metric we were missing.

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

I just got rid of Gratia's family.

Boom, moral values are gone.

@Crimmy

He put a lot of effort into figuring out how to inject maximum edge.

He really did.

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

Ha you people and being able to buy DLC XD

So while we wait on our august host to judge the contest (not shouting at you, Lug, I remember having to judge the fighting game contest), I'm kinda curious to see what inspiration y'all used for your evil character.

For mine... I just took Amy's personal nightmares (i.e. abandonment, being kicked back to her former life, losing her chance), combined that with the smallest push I could think of to unravel an entire story, aaaaaaaand the torture of being a hawk without vision.

Oh, and I threw in a healthy dose of torturing Plank, too. So. You know. XD

@Kaithas

I changed it so Ben never got his second chance, then went Lancelot as fuck.

The obvious inspirations there are his Semblance and Weapon names (Dolorous Guard and Joyous Guard), which were both named after the same castle. Dolorous Guard was what it was called before Lancelot captured it, after fighting through a ridiculous number of warriors to do so. Hence why that's the name for a Semblance that gets stronger with more enemies. And Joyous Guard was what it called after he captured it.

Roundtable Order is obvious, but less obvious is the influence to his backstory; much like Lancelot's reaction to rejection from Guinevere, Ben didn't take washing out of the Beacon entrance exam well. And after a period of emotional turmoil, he dedicated himself to a humble cause. Except where Lancelot's cause was peaceful and stayed that way, evil Ben's was decidedly less so.

And thus with one backstory change you get Anti-Villain Well-Intentioned Extremist.

Heroes of Beacon - the Next Chapter

<Snipped quote by Lugubrious>

@Prince of Seraphs, you want to judge the next contest? It was your idea.

@Guess Who

To be fair to him, it wasn't. I mentioned it while simultaneously mentioning I didn't want to judge it. XD

If I remember right, at least.