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I mean, my half hispanic Puerto Rican wife still gets jokes like these (and hell, she was also born fucking Biloxi, Mississippi, the mainland US, and her mother was born in California (her grandmother was born in Puerto Rico).Vasquez is subjected to an "illegal alien" joke. If it is all one nation, how would that work?
This is just one example. There are many other changes like this.
Sorry, it just seems unnecessary and inconsistent to me.
The United Americas were created during the shooting of Alien in 1979 in Ron Cobb's setting notes:
View attachment 69543
It's just one of the things Cameron chose not to make on-screen use of when making Aliens, like the Ovamorphing. It's mentioned in tie-in books for Aliens however.
I think this could more easily explained as an artifact of the script rather than a serious comment stemming from the lore.Vasquez is subjected to an "illegal alien" joke. If it is all one nation, how would that work?
This is just one example. There are many other changes like this.
Sorry, it just seems unnecessary and inconsistent to me.
The policy of transportation to Australia ended in 1868, but I still get convict jokes all the time.Vasquez is subjected to an "illegal alien" joke. If it is all one nation, how would that work?
This is just one example. There are many other changes like this.
Sorry, it just seems unnecessary and inconsistent to me.
It's more that there is no canon because Fox/Disney has no idea what to do with the IP, so all the licensees have free reign to do whatever and fans are left to make sense of it. I can't be bothered to invest in the ttrpg because 1) it includes obviously stupid stuff like the Engineers and 2) Disney will inevitably produce material that completely contradicts it, just like what Fox did to Dark Horse's continuity by releasing Alien 3 and Resurrection. Dark Horse had to scramble to make sense of it, including by retconning Earth War to feature a robot clone of Ripley and exclaiming that there was an internet outage that erased the evidence of the alien/human war by the time of Resurrection.I suppose the larger problem is that as such there are multiple Alien canons, leaving the game to decide which to use.
(Posted to the ALIEN RPG forum: https://forum.frialigan.se/viewtopic.php?t=11894 )
In the feedback to Building Better Worlds, it was noted that Gemini Exoplanet was listed as an affiliate of Seegson and elsewhere listed as working with Weyland-Yutani which may have been a mistake in the printing:
https://forum.frialigan.se/viewtopic.php?p=86843#p86861
I can't speak for the writers whether it was unintentional or not, what I can speak to from personal experience is how strange some corporate rivalry can get.
Biritish Petroleum has traded Fortune list positions with Exxon/Mobil a number of times since the turn of the century.
Market news pitches this as bitter economic warfare, rivalry, etc.
BP also built and installed the Thunderhorse platform in the Gulf of Mexico which included a seabed pipeline terminal with a pipeline and fiber-optics back to shore.
Rather than build their own, ExxonMobil joined BP in a joint-venture around access to that pipeline terminal from their lease block next to the block where Thunderhorse was setup.
So... rivals can work together if the situation is economically viable enough.
ExxonMobil did the math and found it was far more cost effective to lease space in the terminal and pipeline back to shore than it was to build their own.
You can add a lot of dynamics to your Alien story universe by making rivals into strange bedfellows from time to time to subvert the expectations of the players.
It's more that there is no canon because Fox/Disney has no idea what to do with the IP, so all the licensees have free reign to do whatever and fans are left to make sense of it. I can't be bothered to invest in the ttrpg because 1) it includes obviously stupid stuff like the Engineers and 2) Disney will inevitably produce material that completely contradicts it, just like what Fox did to Dark Horse's continuity by releasing Alien 3 and Resurrection. Dark Horse had to scramble to make sense of it, including by retconning Earth War to feature a robot clone of Ripley and exclaiming that there was an internet outage that erased the evidence of the alien/human war by the time of Resurrection.
Fullfremmen? I like it. It reminds me of Poul Anderson's classic Uncleftish Beholding. A refreshing break from the Greco-Latin monopoly over sciency talk in English.Whose bright idea was it to give the Perfectly Evolved human specimen an Anglo-Saxon/Germanic name?
It’s not like I want to back Disney, but to be fair, unless there’s a single creative mind (and people who know what they’re doing to remind him), without suits getting involved, there really can’t be canon.Like I’d trust the idiots at Disney to have a coherent concept of canon.
A Brit I know calls me ”my Colonial friend”.The policy of transportation to Australia ended in 1868, but I still get convict jokes all the time.
And even then, Lucas never did a particularly good job of keeping a coherent canon with Star Wars despite having complete control over it. He did much better with it then Disney though.It’s not like I want to back Disney, but to be fair, unless there’s a single creative mind (and people who know what they’re doing to remind him), without suits getting involved, there really can’t be canon.
No thanks. Fox and Disney long ago destroyed all my goodwill. I’ll make my own bug hunter IPs and release them into public domain. I encourage everyone else to do the same. Corpos only have power so long as we pay attention to them.Straight up, it is a VERY good game. One of my favorites, even.
- The presence of the engineers and all that silliness is very, very minor and easily ignored. It's firmly grounded in the first two films.
- I know I was just complaining about inconsistency/canon, but anything Disney does could also be easily ignored.
The system is sound and straightforward and it take place in a setting that, minor annoyances aside, is excellent.
Canon is overrated anyway. The Cthulhu mythos doesn’t have one and that’s worked out really well for it. It isn’t copyrighted either, so fans have free reign to do whatever.It’s not like I want to back Disney, but to be fair, unless there’s a single creative mind (and people who know what they’re doing to remind him), without suits getting involved, there really can’t be canon.
Are you going to shoot us if we don't like it?My personal Cannon (since everyone's doing it):
Are you going to shoot us if we don't like it?
Alien 3 never needed to bring back Ripley. It’s an example of what I call “small universe syndrome.” The studios are full of idiots who refuse to let the universe expand organically so they force it to revolve around a recurring character and his/her immediate family. The new TV show in development (assuming the strike didn’t kill it) is finally trying to go the anthology route, but it’s too little too late. The IP is shit now what with all that engineer garbage and completely unnecessary Blade Runner callbacks. It’s called Alien, not Terminator. It needs extensive retconning or even outright rebooting by someone who actually understands it, likes it, and can write. Or just let it die and stop being stupid. Which isn’t going to happen, unfortunately.
This is just par for the course for IPs now. I hate copyright law.
I sure hope you do if you're a moderator on this forum!I've got[...] RPGs[...]
I think if they were going to kill Newt and Hicks offscreen, they should have just killed them all in a crash, and the Alien escape the crash, and then have the prison figuring it out on their own.I think the whole Alien franchise would have been improved if Alien 3 introduced a whole new set of characters instead of turning into the Ripley v Aliens franchise. They would have been able to explore new ideas instead of turning 3 and 4 into weird super hero movies, because lets face it by 4, Ripley was basically a full blown superhero.
Interesting, I never really cared much about Newt and Hicks. From the first viewing I thought they were artifacts of a Cameron script, not anything that really made sense set next to the first movie. Not ineffective mind, but not central. Everyone dies. This is Alien.I’ve never seen 3 because after you all told me what happened to Newt and Hicks, I have no interest. The first two were fine enough, although they would never be favorite movies of mine.
If they would have died another way, I might have given it a watch.Interesting, I never really cared much about Newt and Hicks. From the first viewing I thought they were artifacts of a Cameron script, not anything that really made sense set next to the first movie. Not ineffective mind, but not central. Everyone dies. This is Alien.
No, that's fair, Fincher did them dirty, I won't argue. I just didn't expect them to survive in the first place.If they would have died another way, I might have given it a watch.
Interesting, I never really cared much about Newt and Hicks. From the first viewing I thought they were artifacts of a Cameron script, not anything that really made sense set next to the first movie. Not ineffective mind, but not central. Everyone dies. This is Alien.
It was the 80’s. The big point of the firefight is to highlight why this young Predator on his first hunt becomes so focused on Harrigan. There aren’t any more firefights of that type in the rest of the movie.
For those interested, the "canon" of the setting is currently decided by Andrew Gaska as The Mad Hatter mentioned above.
This is why you see details that first appeared in the RPG in the recent games Aliens: Fire Team and Aliens: Dark Descent. When Gaska introduces something major, as happened with Heart of Darkness, Disney have to approve it, but so far they seem grand with leaving him in charge.
As much as I found it hard to deal with Hicks, Bishop, and Newt dying at the start of the movie, I think Aliens left Alien3 with a major issue in how to move on to its new characters when it had left so many ones alive. It was brutal but it was necessary to make space for Alien3’s new characters, many of which I consider to be as strong and interesting as those of the two previous movies.I think the whole Alien franchise would have been improved if Alien 3 introduced a whole new set of characters instead of turning into the Ripley v Aliens franchise.
Agree with Alien 4. However, in Alien3 Ripley is the monster not the superhero. She may seem more decisive and capable but this is only because she is willing to achieve her goals at whatever the cost, much like the xenomorph.They would have been able to explore new ideas instead of turning 3 and 4 into weird super hero movies, because let’s face it by 4, Ripley was basically a full blown superhero.
Do you mean you see the first film as an artistically closed work in need of no sequels or similar?For me there is no 'canon' for Alien. There is the first film and that's it.
Prey was ok but yeah, that girl's tribe is fuxxored.
Regarding canon I think can mean either:
- What is generally accepted among the vast body of "stuff" produced. By generally accepted I mean what most stories going forward can be expected to use since most people either like it or assume its presence.
Generally speaking this is how folklore works. Once Guinevere was introduced she became generally expected as Arthur's wife, though of course one still gets stories where she isn't. This word is used in folklore studies to refer to things like "the canonical version of the Titanomachy".
- What a corporation uses as a base for future material. That's the sense I mean when I say Gaska is in charge of "canon", i.e. Gaska decides what material others will use to build games, novels, etc.
- The "true" version of a story, whereby "true" here I mean treating as if it were like historical fact. This mostly applies to single author works in the 20th/21st centuries. Such as how Oda might alter the tankōbon releases of One Piece to make changes compared to the magazine versions since "X could not have been there at that time" and so forth
Obviously there is no hard boundary between these things, since for example Gaska will have used elements of what people accept and some reasoning about the timeline to form the corporate canon.
Predator was badass because you have this special forces squad who are severely outmatched even with all their weapons and military savvy. It takes Dutch using prehistoric methods to take out the predator. My favorite sequence is basically from when Dutch falls into the lake to the finish.