jtr7 on 21/12/2008 at 01:17
We can think critically all we want, and we do, but who is your audience? And why do you insist it's our universe and follows the rules of our world? And I cannot fathom why you cannot understand the power of knowledge wielded by one willing to break rules. Many people throughout our own history rose to power rapidly. Many people have changed the future forever with a single radical notion. As I've stated, I already know you are of a mind that I cannot agree with. The more you cut that is well-established fact, and the more you squeeze Gold, TMA, and TDS out of your script, the more you lose me. And ya lost me already. Your reasoning is reasonable to you, but not I. We are at an impasse, and we shall forever remain at one. I've told you where I'm coming from already, and have been repeating it, and you're repeating yourself. We're done here. This works best for you and your tastes, but a number of fans are getting left out.
As I said, if everyone cut out what they found too inconvenient, too silly, nonsensical, irritating, etc., there wouldn't be much left. Quite a lot doesn't make sense, especially on the surface, but the world is meant to be bigger than the game, and have a history, with leftovers of ancient histories affecting the present, and every single character has a life, and they intersect. The game is a base to build upon, but if you half-ass the foundation, it will crumble for many of the fans.
All this stuff was introduced to YOU in TMA, except for the mech-eye, the welder with the modern gas canisters and cranes. You're not thinking of Garrett having a life in-between missions and games. It's not sprung on HIM. Stop thinking in game terms. Just because something is new to Garrett doesn't mean it's new at all. Karras had been working for some time. And I'll reiterate that the tech already existed, but was suppressed, forbidden, or previously buried and forgotten. If Karras is true to his character, and didn't just suddenly snap, he's been tinkering for a long time, and done most of his thing by himself. Thief 2 Gold was to have a mission objective to get a Hammerite priest drunk and get him to spill the beans on Karras's past. Karras had a mind to understand tech intuitively and his discovery of the old tech just exploded creativity all over his genius mind, then he simply told the Hammerite Order to join him in the excitement of discovery and progress, or get out of the way. Hitler, man. Think goofy charismatic Hitler leading a charge and gathering millions of followers. The majority of The City's nobility was eating it up, and funding him well. Karras was paying Truart!
In our real world, it is said that the tech the common people know of is a full generation behind the actual level it is at.
Read Karras's "New Scriptures".
My own impression, when playing the Lost City for the first time, was that someone had looted the place, already, but I think Garrett just made it easier for others to discover for themselves. Unless the Keepers looted Karath-Din themselves, somebody else was there before. The Keepers noted the height of the civilization, and the dangers of the height, even though the Keepers who went to hide the Talisman(s) never came back. The Keeper quote isn't referring to the fire elementals, or monsters. The quote says "civilization". We have no idea why K-D fell, but the Keeper quote makes it seem it wasn't natural disaster. Karras claims to have figured their tech out, Cavador calls the Precursors "Ancestors", capital "A", and writes about Karras's focused interest in certain Precursor items. The Cultivator and Masks are credited to the Precursors.
This is not canon, but shows what the devs had in mind:
"Karras spake: 'Master Builder, Karras will not fail you as the Precursors
did! Where an entire civilization denied Thee and was felled by Thy hand,
Karras shall do Thy will! Thank Thee for directing Karras to their ashes,
to discover their error and Thy gifts they misused, that Karras now uses as
Thou intended."
The Masks, the cultivators, and the rust-gas are all parts of the same thing. It is connected to mind-control, as well, which the masks are implied to be the instrument of. No one knows what the hell happened to Karath-Din, but we are led to believe Karras and his followers found things that are a major part of Karras's doomsday plan.
Did Garrett reseal the secret canal entrance to Lost City? How long before someone noticed the massive drop in water level, and discovered the heavy drainage?
You can completely ignore the world of TMA and anything smacking of what the Mechanists are about, but then, who is your audience? I won't ignore TMA. You already convinced me you really don't want Thief. Thief is what it is, and you are cutting out its liver, kidneys, and bowels, and slicing into the right hemisphere of the brain while trying to keep the heart pumping. Your bias against so many things means I will not support your cause. Ya lost me, already. This ain't gonna bring me back.
If you want to apply science to fantasy, then I fear you don't understand the purpose of fantasy and why it's part of human nature, and will never understand my willingness to accept the fantasy of Thief. I have no desire to make it all work, but it is fun to try and find real world equivalents, but that's for outside of Thief, not within.
"The Guild must protect what we can, by whatever magical and mundane means we posses. The tower must not fall." --Master Ruitan
I have no problem believing they had magical means, and that those means were probably used to keep Karath-Din as intact as it was.
Either get over your shame, or realize you may not be the right person for the job, but enjoy your achievement for what it is.
You said only the mech-eye was being left out, but it REEEEAAALLLY sounds like SOOO much is getting dismissed.
The Shroud on 21/12/2008 at 02:08
Quote Posted by jtr7
I have no desire to make it all work
No wonder we disagree about so many things. Enough said then.
jtr7 on 21/12/2008 at 02:40
Plucked out of context. That says more about you than I. That makes you look sad. What the hell? This is FANTASY, as that genre differentiates from literary FICTION. Fantasy requires the most open mind a person can have, it is unfettered and makes its own rules.
I have no desire to make it all work scientifically. It absolutely is not necessary, and it's disrespectful of the material. In fact, it's ludicrous to do so seriously, but I have no problem with doing it for fun. Since this is for a movie script adaptation of Thief, and not just a ThiefGen discussion free-for-all, and you've retained a great deal of fantasy already, I see no reason for your stubborn bias against that which is part and parcel of the trilogy. It's a trilogy, dammit! One story, three parts. The story of The City, through Garrett's eyes.
I have no desire to make it all make sense according to your rules which I don't understand. Thief makes the rules. If you want to expand upon the rules, laterally, then I can really have fun with that.
I have no desire to force anything that can be forced through scientific deconstruction and revisionist reconstruction to appease a mind that abhors fantasy. If you don't like it, don't get it, don't enjoy it for what it is, then what the heck are you doing? It's like awful plastic surgery that leaves everyone but the patient aghast.
I have no desire to see Thief reduced to mere reality, hammered into submission, a peg of one shape and size forced into a hole of another shape and size.
I have no desire to throw any part of the fabric of that universe out entirely. You think it's a loose thread, but I know if you pull it out the whole trilogy will unravel.
The story is already written. You only have to make it fit the time and create glue between established scenes. Subtract time-consuming stuff without subtracting from that world.
More clues:
[INDENT]m15b07: "Site 2 goes best; it hath yielded up what
Karras wanted, and now we explore its greater
mysteries. How beloved of the Builder these
Ancestors must have been, for surely he did
show them all matter of wonders we can barely
comprehend!........"[/INDENT]
Site 2 is the Civic center and Theater. What happened to all the materials in the Library before Garrett arrived? Maybe the Keepers took the writings. We're still baffled by the pyramids and the Sphinx is 2000 years older then they are. You can't look at the culture of an indigenous tribe and say splitting the atom must not be possible. The Precursors had a big gear driving the arena bridge, and it sits atop something enclosed with metal plates and rivets, hundreds of years before the Hammers built the Olde Quarter. Were the Craymen summoned out of thin air when the Water Talisman was retrieved, or did they crawl out from somewhere unseen? What were the "hundreds of magical fires" floating over the waters below the arena in Karath-Din's heyday? Why Karras's interest in Precursor masks when he already had hundreds of masks already? You don't think the statue of the chaos god of Cthulhu should be taken seriously? The Trickster's punishment of the Kurshok is not a parallel concept?
I ask again, how are you choosing what you will keep or toss? You've kept some wild things and chucked out things that make just as much sense, if not more. Destroy what you don't understand, eh? I'm glad it was with some reluctance that you found a reason to remove the Mechy-tech, but removed it you did, not subdued it, 'cause it doesn't play by your rules. TDP is not insular. Sorry. Steampunk exists, Precursor stuff that blows even the Mechanist's minds exists, Garrett's eye is a trifle in comparison to what is already there.
We haven't been agreeing on much for several posts, now. I don't know what you want from me. I've told you where I stand days ago.
kamyk on 21/12/2008 at 03:07
@Shroud
Excuse me for speaking while the adults have a conversation. I'll just go to my room then shall I?
What is really going on here is simple enough to see for any student of psychology. You didn't open this thread to ask us for input. You opened it to espouse your deviations of the original in an attempt to find and convince someone, anyone to hop on board, and justify what you already question yourself. You don't want our pov, you want to convince us of yours. Your standpoint is not "what do you all think?" It's "I am seeing it this way, argue to convince me I should do otherwise". Slowly but surely you have failed to do more than lose people's support, and each person you have failed to convince, or who is obviously not convincable from the get go, you dismiss, or they leave the thread.
I believe I made some fairly good points, but they pretty much show my standpoint from the outset, so you have simply ignored them.
What he wants jtr is to convince you his "improvements" are justifiable.
jtr7 on 21/12/2008 at 03:19
Well I know that in general, kamyk, but I'm wanting him to get to the heart of his bias and look at himself. The more he says, the more I'm turned off at his bias, and I want him to see how he's alienating his supporters, rather than cultivating a respectful disagreement. He knows there are others, like ZylonBane, who will be happy to see the Mechanists forgotten.
But you do see the same problems I do.
The movie should include as much of the established universe as possible, so that everyone can find what they liked as gamers. It's an aspect of reality to like and dislike things in our world, so that is an instance where I think it realistic to keep everything possible.
Shroud: I'm a bridge-builder by nature. Not between people, but disparate ideas. I make mental collages of concepts that are related or unrelated.
Thief provides many pieces without defining a connection and says, "These exist in this world. This is possible." I look at one piece that the games say exists alongside another piece, and I ask how, in light of all the pieces given, they exist together, and I imagine a bridge between them. I don't force a piece to make sense in the real world when it obviously does not. It is fantasy, and not meant to exist in our universe. I look at the rules defined by
Thief for the possibilities, and fabricate a bridge. I don't destroy a piece, and replace it with almost entirely new fiction, and call it the same or a similar name. I see the Lost City artifacts in the Rare Artifact Bay (Bay 2) of Rampone's and know that the Mechanists were in Karath-Din before Garrett knew. I see Karras and his followers believe they have inherited the Precursor legacy and have revived the technology in their name--a technology that appears to involve necromancy and alchemy. He had Cid Capezza working for him, who, in turn, had Noah Jerm working for him, and this should imply to you that there were many people who weren't even Mechanists working for him. Karras hired Truart to help wipe out the pagans, and the wretched, and the unclean, while providing him with people to convert to Masked Slaves. It was a massive, City-wide effort, and most of it was not done in secret. This is partly why it all happened so fast, and was undone just as fast. Stop thinking your own narrow view is going to be acceptable to the broad range of fans' tastes. When the fans say they like this or that, and don't like this or that, you'll always find someone with the opposite tastes. Typically, those who don't like TMA or the mech-eye are those who just want medieval without the anachronistic or steampunk elements. These taffers like to think there's no electricity in TDP, either.
Thief is (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fantasy) fantasy, not mere fiction. Start with that, if you care what the fans think. :angel:
The Shroud on 21/12/2008 at 22:54
Quote Posted by kamyk
Neither do walking, talking bots that have sight/sensing of some kind or other, and the ai to "think" independantly enough to seek out intruders rather than just blast anything that moves, going by this perspective.
Fair point. However, perhaps there are ways an automaton could work without requiring artificial intelligence. It could be built to fire at anything that moves, and guards and other cleared personnel could be provided with some sort of device that broadcasts a signal which overrides their 'intruder' status. The talking could be pre-recorded messages that would play back whenever a certain stimulus triggers them. So the bots don't have to be smart.
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Nor re-animated corpses integrated into metal shells.
Well Karras doesn't have to use corpses. He could use living subjects and the masks could keep them in a perpetual hypnotic state so they'll do Karras' bidding. Maybe they're kept alive with intravenous fluids.
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It wasn't clockworks and steam engines alone that made all the bots in metal age work - following this line of reasoning.
That's true. Karras would have to invent all of it.
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You will have to write off the entire metal age from the perspective you are following.
I'm not going to write off the Metal Age. I'm going to find ways that it could work.
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It also seems like you are assuming that Karras did all of the things he did under the Hammerites noses in some backyard workshop. The games make it pretty plain that he had almost full support of the church before he began to tread heretical ground, and by that time he had amassed enough hammerites, and other people to his cause to make the mechanists unapproachable.
I never intended to imply that Karras did all of these things in some backyard workshop. Obviously he couldn't have.
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@Shroud
Excuse me for speaking while the adults have a conversation. I'll just go to my room then shall I?
What's that supposed to mean? I never talked down to you.
Quote:
What is really going on here is simple enough to see for any student of psychology. You didn't open this thread to ask us for input. You opened it to espouse your deviations of the original in an attempt to find and convince someone, anyone to hop on board, and justify what you already question yourself.
Actually, it's none of the above. I opened this thread to find out if the weapons and items I've included in the script are the same that most fans would want to see in the movie. So far, the poll shows I chose correctly. At first I really didn't want to get into a big discussion about the screenplay since that's not what this thread was intended for, but after a while I figured it's better to discuss things here than open a whole new thread and have to keep my eye on both at the same time.
I'm also not as interested in espousing my deviations of the original as all the things that I've kept the same - which seem to have been pretty much overlooked in the course of all the accusations hurled at me. I've mentioned my deviations out of honesty. I never expected to get a lot of support for them from Thief fans but that doesn't mean I'm going to keep them a secret.
Now look, can we stop with the psycho-analysis? You don't know me and your presumptions about what's going on in my head are both incorrect and offensive. Clearly the civility in this discussion has gone right out the window.
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You don't want our pov, you want to convince us of yours. Your standpoint is not "what do you all think?" It's "I am seeing it this way, argue to convince me I should do otherwise".
Not true. I have wanted your point of view, and I've gotten it. I would say it's you who don't really want
my point of view.
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Slowly but surely you have failed to do more than lose people's support, and each person you have failed to convince, or who is obviously not convincable from the get go, you dismiss, or they leave the thread.
If I had dismissed anyone, I wouldn't have gone on talking. The very fact that I'm responding to you means I haven't dismissed you - regardless of the fact we both know you are not convinceable. jtr7 made it clear that I "lost" him long ago, but I kept talking to him anyway.
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I believe I made some fairly good points, but they pretty much show my standpoint from the outset, so you have simply ignored them.
I haven't ignored them. I just haven't had time to respond until now. And I agree, you did make some fairly good points.
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What he wants jtr is to convince you his "improvements" are justifiable.
That much is true, but can I speak for myself please?
Quote Posted by jtr7
Plucked out of context. That says more about you than I. That makes you look sad. What the hell?
Alright, look. I am aware of the context. I know what you meant. And it is because of what you
meant that I said what I said. If you feel I misrepresented your statement by including only that portion of it, I am sorry. To me, that statement simply shed light on
why we disagree on a fundamental level. We have two different objectives and that wasn't clear to me until that point.
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I have no desire to make it all work scientifically.I understand.
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I have no desire to make it all make sense according to your rules which I don't understand.Again, I understand.
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I have no desire to force anything that can be forced through scientific deconstruction and revisionist reconstruction to appease a mind that abhors fantasy.Okay, that's going too far. Don't tell me that I abhor fantasy. Maybe that's the only conclusion you can come up with without understanding my reasoning, but still - it's not a fair statement to make.
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I have no desire to see Thief reduced to mere reality, hammered into submission, a peg of one shape and size forced into a hole of another shape and size.
That's ridiculous. If I had reduced Thief to "mere reality", there would be no magic, no Trickster, no Viktoria, no Hammerites, no Keepers, no Lost City, no Maw of Chaos, no burricks, giant spiders, craymen, apebeasts, mantis-beasts, zombies, fire elementals, nothing - just historically-cooperative medieval fiction. That is
not what I have done. You have a tendency to exaggerate, jtr7. Drastically. And you're not being fair at all.
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I have no desire to throw any part of the fabric of that universe out entirely. You think it's a loose thread, but I know if you pull it out the whole trilogy will unravel.
Oh come on now. The mechanical eye does
not equal the thread that will unravel the whole trilogy if pulled out. That's like saying removing moss arrows will somehow invalidate Gamall's scheme to destroy the final glyph. This is fanaticism.
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I ask again, how are you choosing what you will keep or toss? You've kept some wild things and chucked out things that make just as much sense, if not more.
Tell me what makes less sense than the mechanical eye please? And let's not get into magic - we've been over why magic is exempt.
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Destroy what you don't understand, eh?
No. I explained very clearly why I decided to remove the mechanical eye. It had nothing to do with not understanding its symbolic significance to the story. It's about
implausibility.
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We haven't been agreeing on much for several posts, now. I don't know what you want from me. I've told you where I stand days ago.
I haven't really been after anything from you, except perhaps some honesty. I believe I understand your position. What you want is an identical copy of Thief, formatted for the big screen. As such, the plausibility of various fantastic elements isn't really important to you - if they were there, they belong there, if they weren't there, they don't belong there. Plain and simple. Canon is the ultimate priority for you, and it overrules all else.
It's not that we don't share the same values. It's that the
order of those values is different for you and I. For you, the topmost value is authenticity, with things like plausibility coming afterward. For me, the topmost value is plausibility, followed by authenticity. I wish the two could coexist completely on the same plane without any contradictions, but sadly they can't. Some accomodations have to be made.
I understand that we are at an impasse, and that's why I didn't bother saying more earlier. I also got the impression you didn't
want to continue this discussion, based on how adamant you were about our irrevocable differences. I suppose the real question is, what do
you want from
me? And to that end, you have said:
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I'm wanting him to get to the heart of his bias and look at himself. The more he says, the more I'm turned off at his bias, and I want him to see how he's alienating his supporters, rather than cultivating a respectful disagreement.
Well, first of all, when it comes to self-reflection and introspection, that is not something I've ever had trouble with. As for biases, I would say the same thing about you - I believe your ability to think rationally and objectively about
this subject is incredibly biased by your devotion to Thief in its absolute entirety. I have spoken to people with no prior knowledge of Thief, and some with a basic knowledge of Thief (one of whom actually loves the series almost as much as I do) and they think the script looks fine. Not surprisingly, many Thief fans hold the opposite opinion when it comes to my deviations from the original.
I am fully aware of why I hold the opinions that I do. If you want to call my desire for plausibility a bias, so be it. It is a bias
if the ultimate objective is to maintain the Thief series with no changes whatsoever. I understand that that is your primary concern. And I have stated what concerns I have that override my desire to maintain every aspect of the Thief series. But since I have a different ultimate objective from yours, I see your stubborness as biased in much the same way.
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He knows there are others, like ZylonBane, who will be happy to see the Mechanists forgotten.
Actually, I didn't know that. But I don't wish to see the Mechanists forgotten. There are quite a lot of presumptions still going on. How about you let me speak for what I want rather than jumping the gun and coming up with your own judgments of my motives?
The Magpie on 22/12/2008 at 00:57
Ahem.
I reply without having read the previous posts since The Shroud's first post after mine. Not out of laziness, but because I winced repeatedly from what little I gleaned from the argument while scrolling down to the bottom of the page. Let's breathe deeply and be civil. Anything else is likely to bring sadness. :(
So forgive me if this item has been posted before. You asked us about viewpoints (pardon) on the mechanical eye. Why keep it? Why not keep it? Here's why
I think it can be made plausible:
Firstly, you can portray a lot more advanced examples of the clockwork and electrical technology of the Hammers in the script prior to introducing the mech eye, so that when it comes around it's not as jarring to the suspension of disbelief. The trouble with that is that you'd either
* have to invent said examples since they aren't as emphasised in TDP, or
* dwell longer on more of the weird stuff of the Thief Universe to emphasize its alien-ness. I don't know if that'd alienate the audience as well, or if they'd grow accustomed to it and go along with anything you'd throw at them. Could be either.
Secondly, and this is my main point: You might well call the mech eye bioengineering or cybernetics, but its presence is not really any stranger than the rust gas from TMA. It's true that we see no equivalent
technology in TDP, but there's that other factor we see plenty of, which makes it entirely plausible IMO.
Magic.
The Hammers
do employ magic. Technology and magic
do seem to exist in symbiosis, judging from the mysterious (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1354213) collector towers. Garrett
does use magic potions in the game, all of which have biological effects. (I remember being a little miffed when I first discovered this after having bought the game. I had had the impression that there weren't any such fantasy gaming staples in Thief. Point is, it's all a matter of habit.)
Say that the new eye is magic and tech in conjunction. A wizard did it. The universal cop-out explanation, but it works wonders. (*groan* :eww: )
Just to illustrate how this can be done rather beautifully in genre movies:
(
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2f/Hellboy_Shot_1.jpg)
Inline Image:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/2f/Hellboy_Shot_1.jpg/120px-Hellboy_Shot_1.jpgKarl Ruprecht Kroenen from Hellboy. Remember the gas masked SS guy from the Thule Society? The one who in the movie had
a clockwork heart and sand for blood? Did the audience react with disbelief at such an implausibility? Nope, these technological and anatomical impossibilities were gleefully swallowed at face value. And a fun fact: Del Toro (the director, in case anybody here doesn't know him) had apparently written in Kroenen's background/bio notes that K. had made these body enhancements himself
with the aid of black magic.
That's why I think any problems with keeping the mech eye might be circumvented. Rather easily, at that.
--
Larris
The Shroud on 22/12/2008 at 03:04
Interesting, Larris. I'll have to consider this for a while.
kamyk on 22/12/2008 at 06:29
Quote Posted by The Shroud
Fair point. However, perhaps there are ways an automaton could work without requiring artificial intelligence. It could be built to fire at anything that moves, and guards and other cleared personnel could be provided with some sort of device that broadcasts a signal which overrides their 'intruder' status. The talking could be pre-recorded messages that would play back whenever a certain stimulus triggers them. So the bots don't have to be smart.
Except, what prevents them from firing at rats then? Or stray cats, and dogs? Or civilians?
Quote Posted by The Shroud
Well Karras doesn't have to use corpses. He could use living subjects and the masks could keep them in a perpetual hypnotic state so they'll do Karras' bidding. Maybe they're kept alive with intravenous fluids.
That also smacks of cybernetics.
Quote Posted by The Shroud
Actually, it's none of the above. I opened this thread to find out if the weapons and items I've included in the script are the same that most fans would want to see in the movie. So far, the poll shows I chose correctly. At first I really didn't want to get into a big discussion about the screenplay since that's not what this thread was intended for, but after a while I figured it's better to discuss things here than open a whole new thread and have to keep my eye on both at the same time.
I can respect that.
Interestingly enough, I am no huge fan of The Metal age. I hate the bots, alarms, and helmets. I got hugely bored with the game three quarters of the way through, and I think Karras sounds like Elmer Fudd, and is about as intimidating as a grapefruit. However... Like the whole thing or not, it is part of the history of the game world. It isn't my story, it's Garretts. It isn't my place to decide what is or is not part of that world. It's LGS's, and Ion Storm's. The history of the city has taken place. who am I to undo history?
The eye... Again, it is part of Garret's character. Part of his personality developement. As well as tied to the character of the eye itself. As I said, it isn't giving or selfless. If anything the underlying irony is that the eye is
blind in many ways. Giving it a flash of insight or whatever ruins it's character for the rest of the series. Can you see Garret and the eye being "pals" in TDS? o.O
I understand that you had a flash of inspiration that you would like to see realized, I am a multi artistic person myself, and having an idea that just clicks in your head and feels perfect is a very hard thing to let go of. When I am doing a piece of commisioned art however, it isn't what I want that matters. It's what the persons on the receiving end of my efforts want that does. If you are writing a movie script, what you want doesn't matter. What the fans, moviegoers, and producers want does. Especially in the case of pre-existing material.
The Shroud on 24/12/2008 at 06:56
Quote Posted by kamyk
Except, what prevents them from firing at rats then? Or stray cats, and dogs? Or civilians?
I see them being employed only in secure areas, where there shouldn't be any civilians (i.e. trespassers) or stray animals. There's still the possibility of rats of course, although I'm sure the Mechanists would take measures to ensure such vermin were thoroughly exterminated within their premises, since their order tends to abhor uncleanliness.
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That also smacks of cybernetics.
Which, intravenous fluids or the Precursor masks?
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Interestingly enough, I am no huge fan of The Metal age. I hate the bots, alarms, and helmets. I got hugely bored with the game three quarters of the way through, and I think Karras sounds like Elmer Fudd, and is about as intimidating as a grapefruit. However... Like the whole thing or not, it is part of the history of the game world. It isn't my story, it's Garretts. It isn't my place to decide what is or is not part of that world. It's LGS's, and Ion Storm's. The history of the city has taken place. who am I to undo history?
Believe me, I don't want to undo Thief's history and none of the alterations I've made were made out of a
dislike for what's in the games. This may seem hard to believe given my arguments but I actually like the mechanical eye, just as I like gas arrows and noisemaker arrows (actually I plan to include gas arrows in the TMA script once I get to writing it). I even like scouting orbs.
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The eye... Again, it is part of Garret's character. Part of his personality developement. As well as tied to the character of the eye itself. As I said, it isn't giving or selfless. If anything the underlying irony is that the eye is
blind in many ways. Giving it a flash of insight or whatever ruins it's character for the rest of the series. Can you see Garret and the eye being "pals" in TDS? o.O
True, being particularly friendly would be out of character for the Eye. Mind you, even villains can show different sides at times but I do understand the point you're making. Characters should stay in-character as much as possible. Actually, I found it pretty hard to swallow in TMA that Garrett would cooperate under
any circumstances with someone who double-crossed him, ripped his eye out, and left him to die - and not just grudgingly work together, but even grow
fond of that person toward the end and want to avenge her death. I wonder if I'm alone on that one.
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I understand that you had a flash of inspiration that you would like to see realized, I am a multi artistic person myself, and having an idea that just clicks in your head and feels perfect is a very hard thing to let go of. When I am doing a piece of commisioned art however, it isn't what I want that matters. It's what the persons on the receiving end of my efforts want that does. If you are writing a movie script, what you want doesn't matter. What the fans, moviegoers, and producers want does. Especially in the case of pre-existing material.
I think I need to correct some of the perceptions that are forming about my motives behind all this - the alterations, the additions, and my undertaking the writing of the script itself. This isn't about me or serving myself. I'm not writing this script because I want
my name in the credits. Simply put, I'm writing it because I firmly believe it should be done - Thief deserves to be on the big screen. It deserves to be shown proudly to mass audiences and shine with all the things that make it stand out. When you see something that's truly special, you want more people to see it - regardless of whether you created it or not.
This is not about taking all the things I like from Thief and leaving out the rest. There are things I really like from TDP that I hated to remove (Break from Cragscleft Prison, Down in the Bonehoard, and my favorite mission from the game, Assassins!). In fact, I really liked Thief Gold's premise of having four different locations for the four Talismans, and I was disappointed that I couldn't include Song of the Caverns and Mage Towers. I enjoyed Thieves Guild too, but I couldn't fit that in either.
My hope is that a fourth Thief movie could be made someday (assuming the trilogy makes it to the screen in the first place) that could include Break from Cragscleft Prison, Down in the Bonehoard, Assassins!, Thieves Guild, and somehow weave in Song of the Caverns, Mage Towers, and various missing missions from TMA and TDS all into one flowing story.
Obviously my reasons for cutting missions have to do with time constraints rather than plausibility issues, but my point is that I didn't make any of the decisions I did out of selfishness or a desire to add my own 'artistic mark' to the story. This script isn't about me and I don't want it to be. I admire the writing and creativity in Thief much more than my own and I've actually relied almost entirely on what's already there when writing the script, rather than inventing new ideas when they aren't necessary. I know there are strong disagreements about what is and isn't "necessary", but it is at least the
belief in the necessity of something that drives me to include or disclude it, not a fondness for personal contrivances.
I am seriously considering adding back in the mechanical eye, after thinking over things in light of Larris' points. Magic may be the only thing that can adequately justify all the advanced technology in TMA, and as such, there wouldn't be any reason I can think of that the mechanical eye shouldn't be magical as well - other than simply the paradox of magic needing technology to work and vice versa. But considering Hellboy was received so well, perhaps that wouldn't matter to audiences. I'm still thinking about it from various angles, but it might work.
