Complexity Addiction/Quotes

"Okay, let's get Operation Too-Complicated-To-Actually-Work underway."

—Shego, Kim Possible

"What's he up to now? It'll be something devious and overcomplicated. He'd get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line."

—The Rani about the Master, Doctor Who

"The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan."

—Carl von Clauswitz, On War

"You just have to love the fact that Superman doesn’t even give a problem a second thought before his mind goes right to, “I know! I’ll do an elaborate ruse!” He’s gone the ruse route for so long he doesn’t know how to solve problems any other way, not even giving it a few more seconds’ thought to determine if the problem actually exists in the first place!"

—Brian Cronin, Comics Should Be Good

It's so enraging to go through these enormously fierce trials, and then realize that they aren't clever at all, they were just engineered by a woman with infinite time and no sense of proportion.

Example: Her research notes were all written in Dwarvish, which was the language of choice for scientific notation. But then apparently she thought "oh hey, someone might read my notes and figure out my plans."

Now a sensible person might start writing in code. She destroyed the entire Dwarvish civilization, and annihilated their culture. Then she invented Esperanto and taught it to the humans. Nobody speaks Dwarvish except her anymore. Fucking unbelievable. THIS WAS A WHOLE CAMPAIGN.

The whole affair is just so agonizing from start to finish that it hurts just thinking of it.

Like in campaign three, when she introduced a wonder-crop that was like a combination between Potatoes, Wheat and Rice. Grew in huge paddies, each one was the size of a bowling ball, you could take in five crops a year easy, didn't deplete the soil, and, oh yeah, after the tenth year they basically flooded the atmosphere with sentient anthrax, to induce migration inland. YAY.

Or like in campaign two, when she tore open the abyss with a huge ring painted with seven hundred gallons of her own blood carefully extracted and frozen over the course of decades, and used it to suck out the very spirits of entropy and chain them to her will so that she could put out the sun for the fifteen minutes she needed to do some stupid syzygy shit. No no, not because the sun needed to vanish for the alignment herself, she just wanted better lighting to see the stars. Not like she could've just used a telescope or anything.

Every fucking time, we end up dealing with this hideous series of catastrophes, and a campaign later we realize just how trivial the actual motivations behind them were.

—/tg/ (modified to reduce conversation elements)