Alternative Character Interpretation/Quotes
The hell kind of plumber...?
I'm writing your union, tell you what.
I bet they'd love to know you're doing mushrooms,
And blowing up landmarks,
And setting the wildlife on fire.—Rob Balder, Still Annoyed
A discussion about the nature of eternity, set against a blank, featureless void: behold the beginning of the transformation of The Family Circus into Existential Despair Comics.
You're an industrialist, trying to modernize a backward planet and raise up standards of living through the use of technology, for the common good. One day, some of your industrial robots are blown up by a sentient, supersonic blue hedgehog. That's scary as fuck. Now, said hedgehog has it in his head that you're a monster who's turning animals into robots and wants to take over the world and oppress it, in large part because of all the steroids, speed, colloidal silver, and other assorted shit he's been taking in massive quantities for the past decade. You decide to see if you can't reason with the guy, but for your troubles you get assaulted, and your ride gets trashed beyond recognition.
So you decide to deal with this like you would with any other pest problems: You put out some traps, like spike pits, modify a couple of your robots with .22 rifles, etc. The way you'd deal with any rodent, really. Soon enough, the hedgehog gets himself impaled, and you're done. Or so you think. Soon after, despite having quite clearly been drained of his precious bodily fluids, he's back and trashing your robots again. Maybe the other one was some sort of decoy? No matter, you're taking this into your own hands. You modify your ride, mad max style, adding a couple of guns, some spikes, missile, slowly swinging giant balls, that kind of stuff. Then you roll. You meet the hedgehog and after a brief struggle where he manages to make one or two lucky hits on spots you haven't really bothered armoring, you make him into thin gruel. This time you're sure he's done for.
How wrong you are. Soon after, he's back. You can't believe it. You try to kill him yourself once more, but this time he seems to know where to strike. He seems to know when to strike. He seems to know when you'll strike. Once you realize that, you try to change your attack patterns, but it's too late, he's done enough damage to blow up your vehicle, and you barely escape with your life. For the next few days, he follows you, destroying everything you throw at him, and it's obvious he won't stop until he gets you. You can't sleep. You watch as he destroys everything you've done to help people: one after another, chemical plants, oil refineries, amusement parks, all you've built, gets blown up by this satanic, unholy, immortal demon from the deepest pits of hell. When you do manage to take him out, he's back within hours.
Eventually, as you're trying to escape to the one place where you think you're safe, space, he defeats one of your latest creations, and for the first time, you're face to face with him. There's no steel plate protecting you. There's no vertical distance. He's there, staring at you with those empty, demonic eyes.
You run like you've never run before. You just fucking run.
Remember that movie "Footloose", where those evil kids won in the end?
A fastidious pigeon-worshiping felt tyrant whose draconian Shari'a law allows for neither loud noise nor rubber duckies!
This was a world where orcs were used as target practice by elvish communities. The elves loved that shit. Sauron put a stop to that by offering all the underprivileged creatures a place in his non-race-exclusive army (the only nonsegregated force in Middle-Earth except for the Fellowship) with promises of their own country and a future. After what he did for the orcs and goblins, Sauron was just some towering mace-wielding folk hero."
— Cracked.com, 9 Famous Movie Villains Who Were Right All Along.
I wanted to find an escape too, but every word I'd heard confirmed my fear that Heather had somehow allied herself with a ghost. What I wasn't sure of was the danger -- was Helen as wicked as Heather made her out to be, or was she merely a lost child looking for someone to love her?
—Molly, Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story
The players are the scum of the military, people who were too useless, dangerous or incompetent to keep around, but not worth the hassle of discharging. The entire leadership of the organisation consists of those who were too zealous, too fanatical to do their jobs, but not so incompetent it was grounds for discharge. They've been rammed into this organisation, created as an administrative black hole in a desperate attempt to clean out the scum of the armed forces of the world, given the most insane paranoid goal the world could think of to guarantee these men would never be allowed into combat, and given only those resources that are cheaper to hand over than throw away, the obsolete relics of long-past acquisitions and failed research programs.
Except then the one thing nobody ever believed could happen, did. We are attacked by aliens, and suddenly this tiny shitfunded organisation full of incompetent psychopaths and retarded psychotically-nationalistic armchair generals are the only thing standing between a military superior in every way to our own and the loss of earth and the enslavement of the human species.
The governments, now panicking, throw money at you, and you throw bodies at the aliens, spending hundreds of lives in insane and incompetent strategies to buy time that could only ever have been thought up by the zeal-over-intelligence fools in charge.
Your technology slowly improves, almost as fast as the death rates, the psychological traumas, and the horrific collateral damage, and through retrograde technological adaptation and sheer Darwinism you've turned billions of dollars and thousands of lives into a few dozen soldiers who actually stand a chance, every last one of them insane, running the gamut from acquired sociopathy to outright psychosis.
They start fighting back, and winning. With more money and troops into the meat grinder, you succeed in driving away each wave, but each time all you do is draw the attention of higher-authority foes and more powerful foes. It is near the end, and you've lost entire nations to horrific attacks, millions of soldiers from standard militaries, and X-Com has an honour roll longer than that of every war fought in the last fifty years and is now full of a few dozen of the most dangerous men ever to live armed with equipment powerful enough to make them individually a match for entire armoured companies. They are a knife in the dark, fast, deadly, and all but unstoppable. And yet, they are now all-but irrelevant. Your every loss is more than your forces can bear, and your every victory only causes the foe to escalate, until at last a mission goes catastrophically wrong and the fragile control you have managed to exert over an impossible situation is torn away. The aliens press their advantage and attack with such force that even if you found a hundred such troopers for every one you have now they would still be outmatched a thousand to one.
We have lost.
And yet, facing certain defeat, we can see for the first time a chance at victory. We have lost earth, but with it goes the need to defend. The time has come to strike. A final apocalyptic attack order is issued, and your forces fly to Cydonia as Earth burns behind them.
They succeed, despite all odds, with scarcely a handful of survivors flying back, to see a world utterly ravaged, half its population dead, the environment permanently altered, famine due to claim billions in the next thirty years, and reconstruction work to consume the combined productivity of the world for the next two hundred years . Even now, as the one man who lived through the entire conflict, a chump who never had a choice and at every stage of the war just wanted to go home, steps into the burning ruins of his homeland, only for the few survivors of his nation to beg him to turn around and leave. He is, quite simply, too great a threat to be allowed to live in the savaged carcass of human civilisation.
That is X-COM.
Another thing about comic heroes I never got.
Why the hell does one bend one and the same character into ten different shapes instead of just coming up with another one, or ten?
I mean, there are alignment charts with only Batman in them.