Grrl Power #126 – What if the thing he’s best at is getting stabbed?
Sydney is far from the first person to suggest that Wolverine is actually a terrible fighter because he relies so heavily on his regeneration – of course, the same thing could be said of anyone who has armored skin. Next time you see a hero in a comic charging into a room with bullets dramatically bouncing off him, think about how much better heroes that can’t afford to get hit have to be than him.
The conversation is skirting dangerously close to becoming meta at this point, but I figure if there were real superheros, they’d sit down and have a conversation about superhero tropes at some point. They’re not going to run through them all right now of course, as there are a killion of them, but it’s a fair bet this isn’t the last time they’ll come up in the story.
If you’re not familiar with the term “trope,” it basically means a writing convention that an audience will recognize. I think the best way to explain it is if you remember the scene in True Lies were the Bad Guy is giving his speech about America Bad, etc, and the henchman’s camera runs out of battery? Everyone in the audience figured the henchman was going to get shot by the Bad Guy. That’s a trope because everyone knows that Bad Guys off failed henchmen. Of course, James Cameron subverted the trope by having the Bad Guy just tell the henchman to go get another battery. It’s easy to confuse trope with cliché, as some tropes are so common they actually are clichés, but mostly they’re just useful terms to describe recurring elements in storytelling.
I’m going to do something dangerous here and link TVTropes, but first a warning. Remember when you discovered Wikipedia the first time, and you went to read up on the Moon Landing, and 4 hours later you had 32 tabs open and were reading about Pavlova? Well, TVTropes is an order of magnitude worse than Wikipedia, so don’t click the link if you have any plans for the rest of the day. BTW thanks to whoever is updating the Grrl Power tropes page. For some reason I can’t log in to do any editing. Click with caution my friends. TVTropes.org
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You are awesome…and, note that Wolverine is actually very good at ‘what he does’….but, what he does is ‘kill minions with no concern for his own safety’.
Wow, so prescient! How long was this before civil war?
You totally called the cyborg arm!
Three years before the movie, I don’t recall when the original comic series came out.
Oh, looking it up it was 2006. So maybe not so much prescient as reactive.
Slight change of topic: these past few pages offered a perfect opportunity to find out if one of the two unknown orbs could do healing stuff, what with her eye having been harmed a little.
It would push my suspension of disbelief to the limit if one of the mystery orbs turned out to have healing capabilities. As a gamer that would be one of the first things Sydney would have checked the orbs for. And she has had months to experiment with them.
From her reaction to the mere mention of a paper cut, I think we can take it that Sydney would not deliberately inflict an injury on herself. Thus limiting the testing until such an opportunity came along. But the first time that she got a bruise, scratch or came across an injured animal she could have tested it.
And we have seen that Sydney habitually uses the orbs, whenever possible. Using the flyball as a furniture substitute, siezing any excuse to lift stuff with her tentacle, doing random sweeps with her truesight orb and so on. I cannot see that Sydney would not have tested the orb, especially with any injury which was painful enough to keep her attention focused long enough to enact the attempt. Which would only take a moment.
As this would be a dull negative, and just one example of testing amongst dozens of other key ones, it would be far better to do it as part of a compilation, or other way of covering these things. Which I imagine Dave has lined up with a particular angle, as part of her basic training.
However it is possible that the orb does have such properties. But, if so, I would expect there to be a damned good reason why Sydney was unable to use it previously. Be that she may only be able to use it on others, or it may not work until she has had some first aid training and the orbs are satisfied that she is competent to use them, or whatever.
But for her to have failed to try healing for months of use, and with all the bumps and bruises that an active tomboy would be bound to get (and as we have seen since joining Archon) and never to have thought to try it? No way.
Only one thing wrong with what you wrote, and that is, if Sydney had tried to use one of the unknown orbs for healing, she didn’t say anything about it during the interview, and there was a perfect opportunity to say something about it when they mentioned the paper cut.
A slightly lesser issue is that we are seeing Sydney use the orbs freely because she knows she can without getting into legal trouble. Prior to the interview, she apparently had not used them for some considerable time (they were “asleep” or something, although still tethered to her, and would come to her on the appropriate mental impulse –and I wondered if, when the orbs were in that state, someone else might be able to activate and take over command of the orbs).
Possibly anybody can use her orbs. That aspect has not been tested at all. I doubt it, the tethering seems to indicate that they do not want to be separated from Halo (which would reasonably extend to preventing theft or other usurpation of her control.
But if so, it would be better if they could only do so with such a restriction.
Most likely that only happens on the death of a user. Sciona is the only one to have been in a position where she could have found out. But that would have only have been possible if the checkpoint reset was delayed until a while after Halo died (if she did).
This could have happened mind, given that Sydney only has memory to go by. Had she fainted, on seeing the needle approach, that would be her last conscious memory. If that was not sufficient to trigger the recall (Pixel did not get recalled, even after being strung up upside down, and Halo might be mentally tough enough that she too remained), then Sydney would have a false impression about when she did get recalled.
Then it just comes down to when the orbs consider an owner to be dead, when compared to whatever criteria Krona programmed in. For instance one may choose ‘cessation of heart beat and breathing’, whilst the other might opt for ‘clinical brain death’. If Krona chose the latter, and the orb creators the former (perhaps not being aware of human resuscitation techniques), then Sciona may have gotten to try out the orbs, prior to the reset.
During those months Sydney will have tried just about every magical property that games and comics have granted to magic items. Which would likely result in hundreds of tests.
Most of which would result in a heck of a lot of negatives. The orbs do not: create gold coins, transmute mundane coins into gold, teleport coins from nearby peoples pockets, create an extra dimensional storage space for coins, and so on.
Yet Sydney never mentioned those tests to Arianna, even when they were talking about money.
Nor did she mention that the orbs cannot recreate the likenesses of super heroes, make little statuettes of them, allow her to remotely scry on supers (even the real ones she has seen reported on TV) despite plenty of opportunities to raise such negative reports. For instance when they were looking for Sciona previously.
Failing to mention one negative test, amongst hundreds of others is not unexpected. Especially when she had the far more important and enjoyable task of showing off the powers she does actually have. Diminishing that, by talking about negative results, is not something that I think would appeal to Sydney.
Rather I expect such to be limited to when they are doing hands-on trials sometime. If Maxima says ‘next we are going to test healing’ then I would expect Sydney to volunteer what she has already tried herself.
Or if she gets stuck in an elevator, with Vale, for more than five minutes, and she runs out of other stuff to say.
But that mainly because it would be really funny, to see Vale panicking at being trapped with Sydney.
Wolverines job in a party is tank. Every hit he takes is a hit a party member DIDNT take. Since he can just heal it off hes the best one to get hit.
Which never explains why villains are so stupid as to only shoot at the guy who can regenerate. As opposed to the one who has fiery beams coming out of his eyes! Take out the blaster first, before the one with the sharp claws closes with you!
Unless he has an unexplained power, like super-luck, Cyclops should have died years ago. Even with fast reflexes, Wolverine does not have super-speed, so cannot intercept every bullet or blast heading Cyclops’s way.
Mind you I am an X-Man fan, but it is one of those things you need to have a big suspension of disbelief box to hand, in order to drop that nagging thought in.
The problem is that it can be tricky to concentrate on strategy when there’s a loud, hairy, angry Canadian with impossibly sharp claws charging straight at your face screaming murder.
As Setsuko points out, the job of a tank is to take hits for the team. Which means that part of the tank’s job is to make sure they’re the ones getting shot at — by wading into the thick of it and making themselves the biggest, loudest, scariest threat they can be and draw all the aggro.
A lot of people hated “The Wolverine” but it did a great job explaining this. Basically, Logan has built his entire combat style around his ability to recover from injury. It takes effort to avoid getting hit, and Wolverine just ignores that part of combat so he can focus on offense. He’s basically a berserker, ignoring his own safety in favor of attacking the enemy.
Words of wisdom……………….
Why should the tank dodge you?
You should dodge the tank.
Meaning, you will inflict more damage to yourself, than what is done to the tank..
Thing is why would you dodge something that does not harm you for long, it just slows down bad guy take downs to dodge harmless bullets and buys time to set up something that might take you down. Plus bullets hitting you would prevent them from hitting innocents.
If one stops being bullet proof they might start dodging bullets pretty well.
Reminds me of an old Punisher comic where Punisher runs wolverine over with a steam roller after blasting off his face and balls.
Wolverine is absolutely the best there is at what he does.
What he does is, with alarming frequency, double as a sword scabbard.
It JUST clicked with me – Sydney in Panel 7 is glaring at the unknown orbs, daring them to contradict her.
“Since I don’t have any bad powers… RIGHT GUYS!?!?!”
Orbs: No no yeah no no bad powers here nope no none at all
Brown Unknown Orb: *whistles tunelessly, says nothing*
Upon rereading and recieving my own diagnosis, I’m willing to file ‘ADHD’ under powers with a double edge to them.
re: brick/regen types getting hit more often. Yes, it’s because they’re preventing the squishies from getting hit.