Quote from: Wompdonkey on Aug 16, 2022, 05:23:30 PMI like Zula and don't think she's been written too well in the past. I liked Defiance more than most people on this site it seems
I don't really have any problems with Zula as a character, but she's just too fundamentally flawed. It
should be an interesting framework for a character. This disabled Colonial Marine full of regrets and desperate to prove herself after getting badly injured in her very first combat drop.
But the way the story of Defiance is framed around Zula just makes her... silly. Professional militaries never worry about the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Also, professional militaries know that soldiers get killed or maimed in battle. It's literally part of the job. So, no matter how much it costs to train a Colonial Marine, if that Marine gets blown up in their first battle, the Corps moves on, and trains a replacement.
Which works both ways. Zula Hendricks would have been medically separated and shifted off to the Veterans Administration. If the Corps believed she could serve in some kind of non-combatant role, or maybe the contract is a "federal service" contract and she gets sent off somewhere to be put behind a desk doing data entry or something. What the government
wouldn't do is go to the time and expense of having surgeons fix her, only to send her back out to strenuous duty where she is likely to get broken again, where they have to have surgeons take the time and expense to fix her again. The Marine officer literally comes in, berates her for costing them a ton of money, then the Corps sends her back out to cost them more money? Nevermind how ridiculous the scene is with the officer scolding her for getting blown up by artillery, why is this future government so bad at accounting? Also, who was shooting at them? The officer and her NCO mention "bugs" but apparently they are bugs with mortars?
The whole concept for Defiance is stupid, which made it hard for me to really get into it. If Zula is the protagonist, the story needed a more intelligently written way to get her involved in the action. As it was written, it felt like one person wrote a story, and then somebody else came and inserted a protagonist they'd imagined up, who was a small-framed woman who wanted to prove she was as good as everyone else, but also she was physically disabled.
I was a Marine for ten years. Carried a combat load and a radio for much of it. I've got a bad back and two bad knees because of it, lol. What most people don't realize is the most important part of being a Marine is not the ability to pull a trigger and hit a target. It's to carry a shitload of weight for a long ass time, and then still be able to pull a trigger and hit things after you've been exhausted and sore for hours or even days.
So how do you do this intelligently? You have to reframe the story around something where she makes sense as the protagonist. Maybe Zula had been a co-pilot in the Colonial Marines and was medically separated out of the Corps after her dropship crashed, so she took a low level job as an orbital ferry pilot because low/no gravity was easier on her injuries. Then, she gets wrapped up in things beyond her control when the Davises' mission goes bust. But having her clomping around pretending to still be a Marine in body armor or heavy EVA suits, only with a crippling spinal injury to boot, is beyond silly. They needed to pick a character for Zula. Is she the Action Protagonist, or your "Crippled Woman Desperate to Prove Herself?"
Then the subsequent stories for Zula Hendricks seem to forget about her back injury entirely.
Also, apparently Ripley is no longer the winner of the "Worst Luck Always Encountering the Alien" award. Also, how many times was the Alien encountered between the events of Alien and Aliens? So much for the ECA Rep saying "Never recorded once in over 300 surveyed worlds." Was it recorded on all of the other 300 worlds? Is their reporting and record-keeping system that bad? The Zula Hendricks "continuity" is probably one of the worst things in the garbled mess that is the Alien "canon." I'd be happy if she just went away at this point.
Quote from: Still Collating... on Aug 17, 2022, 10:45:10 PMBut no, the magical goo can do anything, why care about consistency and logical changes, explanations etc.
I mean, you literally just described the plot twists of Prometheus and Covenant. Magical Goo is unfortunately inextricably tied to the Alien franchise at this point.
