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Saturday night was the capstone to my FIREFLY/SERENITY chronicle, begun a couple of years earlier with a couple of sitdown roleplaying games, kicked off in full earnest with the BIG DAMN HEROES live-action RPG, continued in a slew of sitdown games, then concluded with the THRILLING HEROICS live-action RPG. A bunch of great roleplayers brought it all to life, including (sorry for no HTML links) Doctorray, Gotham_Bound, Karteblanche, Casket_girl, Castle_Kevorah, Shad0, Ladyeuthanasia and Ian_Tiberius. I can't thank the players enough, nor site hosts Mr. Retsej, Big Al and Corporatescum, and I wish I could've been a fly on the wall for all the great exchanges and interactions that happened.
The entire series of games gave me a chance to indulge my usual silly in-jokes (basing plotlines on THE BARON OF ARIZONA, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER, FORT APACHE, THE SEARCHERS and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, among others -- as well as creating the horrific manga-style idoru called Howdy Monkey) and awful vocal impressions (including NPCs with voices modeled on Ricardo Montalban, James Stewart as a drunk and slightly deranged commander of a garrison hopelessly surrounded by Reavers, Sean Connery, Christopher Walken expounding on the dangers of a frightened marmot in Simon's trousers, and George Takei as an unctuous frontier pimp). Naturally, I also got to do some crazy esoteric shit, like creating the Triad plotline with overtones of Carlos Castaneda, Ray Bradbury, Italo Calvino, Sergio Leone, Mexican superstitions, Theodore Roszak, early Gothic Horror stories, and especially David Cronenberg-meets-Sam Peckinpah.
I also got to expound on such Browncoat-specific subjects as:
- Why creating River for her alleged purpose makes no sense, except to satisfy the Whedon formula of kickass teenage girl (I still made sense of her in the end, though)
- Why nobody ever considered going back to terraform Earth That Was, if you can take a bunch of lifeless moons and planets and fix them up into a 'Verse ("We just *got* here...")
- How the Alliance isn't necessarily all bad, and the Browncoats aren't necessarily all good
- How Malcolm Reynolds and his crew could continue to operate as usual, even after the climax of SERENITY
- What the point of Blue Sun was, why they wanted River back even if the Alliance no longer did, and what they were trying to do
- How Reavers could even begin to function well enough to operate ships and even increase their own number (and no, it's not "when a Reaver loves a Reaver very much...")
And I got to kill off Niska, The Operative and Jubal Early -- though I kind of left Badger in limbo.
Due to player cancellations and one outright flake-off, the participants in THRILLING HEROICS missed out on a couple of characters I really wanted to see performed:
- Sable, Badger's highly competitive kid sister
- Professor Laszlo Kurtz, slick frontier impresario who's actually a lethal agent of the Alliance-within-the-Alliance (it's a long story)
Of course, the players gave me tons of surprises and delights, not least of which being the resolution of the Mal/Inara tensions, taking the Simon/Kaylee relationship to its next level (and resolving forever the possibility of Jayne/Kaylee), showing how Zoe survives her emotions after the death of Wash at the end of SERENITY, and much more.
Though I did have Shepherd Book (arguably my favorite character) make a cameo appearance in a hallucination(?) during a sequence when Simon suffered a brain injury, I never dared to attempt any (flashback, dream, etc.) appearance for Wash. He's just too damn good. I opted to leave that one to Whedon, forever. I couldn't top that, and didn't want to embarrass myself trying.
I got to roleplay being Joss Whedon, and I enjoyed it tremendously. Of course, I got to experience more FIREFLY/SERENITY than he did (damn the network), so I'm spoiled.
All in all, it was a terrific creative exercise, a great opportunity to socialize with some really marvelous people (and to often be awestruck with their creativity), and to just wave my hands in the air and make shit up. (Essentialsaltes should start charging me for using that phrase.) So I'd like to finish this ramble with a few pertinent quotations I used for the closing email of the LARP thread...
======== MALCOLM REYNOLDS: There's just an acre of you fellas, ain't there? (TO ZOE) This is why we lost, you know. Superior numbers. ZOE WASHBURNE: Thanks for the reenactment, sir. ========
"The two things that matter the most to me: Emotional resonance and rocket launchers. PARTY OF FIVE, a brilliant show, and often made me cry uncontrollably, suffered ultimately from a lack of rocket launchers." -- Joss Whedon
"It's about how much freedom you can take away from somebody before they either fold or fight, ... It's about the right to be wrong and the nature of human beings, that they need the freedom to be wrong. That they cannot be made to be better or perfect." -- Joss Whedon
"Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck." -- Joss Whedon
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