Aliens: Aftermath #1 (Marvel, One-Shot)

[Ultramorph]

Re: Fire and Stone.

Yes and no. It is a Weyland team looking to follow up on what happened to the Prometheus but it's like 100 years after the fact. That's probably due to constraints from the studio, though. They sort of try to answer why they never went back in Life and Death, with the Marines putting LV-223 on quarantine but that's super weak given how powerful WY and then the USM are after that.

[Xenomrph]

WY tends to be as powerful as the narrative requires it to be - in 'Aliens', it's not that powerful in the grand scheme of things.

[Nightmare Asylum]

I completely passed on reading Fire & Stone (and its followup) on the basis of being crossovers, to be honest. AVP just doesn't do it for me. It always bummed me out that Dark Horse's only excursion into prequel material was in a crossover title.

[Immortan Jonesy]

Re: Fire and Stone.

Yes and no. It is a Weyland team looking to follow up on what happened to the Prometheus but it's like 100 years after the fact. That's probably due to constraints from the studio, though. They sort of try to answer why they never went back in Life and Death, with the Marines putting LV-223 on quarantine but that's super weak given how powerful WY and then the USM are after that.

Just my opinion, but I think Fire & Stone should be retconned in favor of a new take.

[BlueMarsalis79]

Agreed it is just a mess, although I truly wish it worked, as I adore the idea of going back but it just went sideways right from the start with what it did to the planet.

[Immortan Jonesy]

I haven't read Into Charybdis yet, but I have read interesting things in the spoilers. I would like something more serious. Like there, but after Prometheus, as part of Alien and not AVP.

[Xenomrph]

I completely passed on reading Fire & Stone (and its followup) on the basis of being crossovers, to be honest. AVP just doesn't do it for me. It always bummed me out that Dark Horse's only excursion into prequel material was in a crossover title.

The Alien and Prometheus stories kinda work on their own, although you're missing parts of the narrative if you don't read the other parts.

Agreed it is just a mess, although I truly wish it worked, as I adore the idea of going back but it just went sideways right from the start with what it did to the planet.

I actually liked what it did to the planet, I thought the black goo going wild and messing the planet up was really cool.

[BlueMarsalis79]

But it does not do that, I can not reconcile that with what we see in the films, or in my opinion other depictions that get it much closer to the mark- such as The RPG, Cold Forge, Into Charybdis, and so on honestly.

It is total nonsense to me.

And I'm so glad we have moved away from it.

[Xenomrph]

I think we've had this discussion before and we'll have to agree to disagree. I didn't see any problems between Prometheus and Fire & Stone, or really any irreconcilable differences with Covenant for that matter.

You call it nonsense, I call it "scary chaos" - you don't know what the goo is going to do but you know it's not going to be fun. I'm totally cool with that.

[Local Trouble]

Isn't it just an accelerant?

[Xenomrph]

Isn't it just an accelerant?

In Fire & Stone? I think so - it causes unpredictable "evolutionary" changes, and it causes them very quickly.

[BlueMarsalis79]

The stronger stories don't go with that and that's part their quality. The unknown can be scary but when it's got no quantifiable factors it just ultimately becomes eye rolling. That's part of why Cold Forge, and Into Charybdis work, when you know in part what's going to happen when X approaches Y it creates dread.

So when you set up the rules in the first book then pay them off in the sequel, it is infinitely better storytelling than just doing whatever arbitrarily, and for one particular character that creates something that's genuine not just narratively but thematically.

The Pathogen does not affect flora in the films so to me that's a obvious contradiction, and it eliminates all the fauna, it does not create an ecosystem.

[Xenomrph]

The pathogen in the first movie didn't kill all life, it changed it - that's what it did in F&S. Just because we didn't see it changing the limited flora we see in Prometheus doesn't mean it couldn't do it. That's F&S's point - what we saw in Prometheus was the tip of the iceberg, and who knows what's under the surface or how deep it goes. "What's going to happen? Nothing good" is also dread, even if you don't know what's going to happen. Prometheus and Alien coasted on that pretty heavily for first-time viewers.

Saying F&S contradicts movies plural seems bizarre seeing as how Covenant didn't exist when F&S was written.

Again, we'll have to agree to disagree.

[BlueMarsalis79]

I will grant you that upon first viewing it's easy to come away with the interpretation that it's just change, but when you go look at Prometheus' development it becomes clear what it is driving at with the Ebola comparison, them talking about Holloway and Fifield all being part of one process, and the other drafts, I just honestly think the people behind Fire and Stone did not do their research and it shows.

And to be fair I did originally write above "the films" though, that's all of them, not just the one at the time of it's production.

[Xenomrph]

Well I mean, what I said still stands - comparing F&S to Prometheus, the one thing readers and moviegoers would have to compare it to, F&S is fine. Comparing it to behind-the-scenes stuff that the audience isn't privy to unless they go hunting is a little unfair. Is it an interesting footnote? Sure, but F&S still doesn't contradict Prometheus.

'Aliens' contradicts the behind-the-scenes intent of the Alien lifecycle in the first movie, and James Cameron knew it - his reasoning was "if it's not on-screen in the movie, it doesn't count" (and rightly so).