: Ha! I'm back! I had to leave town to go to a wedding, and
: now that I've returned you all will pay!
: Well, no, that isn't what I meant, really. Actually, it's
: quite nice to see you all again. See you all... pay!
: Er, um, perhaps I should just get on with the theorizing.
::throws money at Dave and stops trying to understand::
: GURPS says this, huh? Aw, I personally always liked the
: theory that the big explosion at Rhi'anon was what a
: dispersal dream sounded like when it hit a massed army
: of half a million thrall.
Sorry, it seems that was wishful thinking on my part. All GURPS says is that the Rhi'anon explosion occurred at about the same time as the head was thrown into the Devoid. It doesn't actually say that Balor's body was what blew up. So the dispersal theory is alive and well. You know, I wonder if Seabolt actually beat The Great Devoid himself? He may have thought the endgame cutscene explosion was at Rhi'anon simply because he didn't see the end of the level. Dan, did you ever ask him about that?
: It's a good theory but it ignores a basic function of the
: Mythverse, which is that it possesses a fully working
: Pathetic Fallacy (if you folks don't know this one,
: it's a term from Literary Theory, which describes how
: in many old stories the weather, the stars, comets,
: etc. can be affected by dramatic happenings in the
: plot, for instance the Star of Bethlehem appearing
: over Christ's birth, or lions walking the streets of
: Rome just before Julius Caesar got his). We know that
: comets appear on cue and that the weather in the
: Mythworld is driven by dramatic effect (else why have
: it start raining so hard, right when you need your
: dwarves the most?). I've always thought the explosion
: was merely the very earth being unhappy about being
: contaminated with such foul evil, and rising up
: against those who would pollute it... well, something
: like that.
Hey, for me it also stops raining right when I need my Dwarves the most; the last few TFL levels had very pleasant weather. Besides, that weather-for-dramatic-effect stuff is usually confined to special effects; I mean, the pre-Ides shades of dead people and animals didn't actually go around killing people and stealing stuff, nor did comets fall on anyone's house (as comets are wont to do). Tharsis is the obvious exception, but there's some indication that there's an actual physical cycle-related reason for its periodic eruptions. Anyway, I'd think that the Mythworld earth would have built up something of a tolerance to foul evil, given the amount that regularly walks its surface and burrows through its bowels. If *I* were the earth, I'd be thankful if Balor's head was just thrown into a bottomless pit in me and it didn't have to touch me except when it bounced off the walls occasionally, maybe eventually escaping into another universe or whatever might be down in the Devoid. Of course I'm not the earth, so that's not exactly a lethal blow to your theory. But I'm trying really really hard to think like it...I'm big...I'm round...people walk on me...urggghhh...
: Your Balor as Super-Wight theory works, too, though.
Please! Give the man some dignity! It's the Balor as Super-Simulacrum theory.
