Samuel Peterson > Recent Status Updates

"The bar your character arrives at is:
"○a fancy five-star restaurant
"○a raucous town festival
"○a sanctified religious space"
What bars are these?!

Often in modern writing the character in a book is less of their own person and more of a vessel of the writer fulfilling a head-fantasy of how they were treated by service workers and how they would respond in kind, usually in an egregious manner with no consequences for their actions against the customer.

"Ask anyone who has ever worked a service job, and they'll tell you the exact same thing: you can tell everything about someone by how they act as a customer. Whether kind or cruel, someone's true character inevitably comes out when they're asked to interact with workers." As someone who worked a service job, this is true. And you can tell when someone writing a character if they had ever worked a service job.

"Character isn't what you are, it's what you do. And oftentimes, what you do extends far beyond the 'big' moments in a story. How a character acts in ordinary scenarios, mundane moments, and on some random Tuesday defines them as much as how they act in the heat of the epic battle for the fate of the world." This is something that a lot of writers for Star Wars and Marvel got wrong, both in comics and on screen.

"Everyone thinks they want to be a hero until it actually costs them something." Bullseye living up to his name in the figurative sense as well as the literal one. The thing is: how soon is this cost going to come to both Harry and Peter? And by what degrees? According to recent issues of this series, it may have cost Peter his life. But this is not the first time that Peter/Spider-Man has died.

Huh, so this new Shocker was just some guy who had picked up his shock gloves from another person that had died while being given them by the holographic Tony Stark. These are supposed to be for a hero, but what hero uses this sort of power?

"No one wins 100 percent of the time. That would be not only unrealistic, but also bad storytelling. People think of failure as the end of a story, but really, it's the beginning. What your character does when they fail, when they fall tragically short of their goals, is illuminating." The people in charge of Star Wars since Disney bought it have not followed this advice; they are against it. Marvel's past 6 years to

"You sly dog! You got me monolouing!"

And fourth, this nerd that Harry and Gwen have with them to break into a Stark warehouse is Otto Octavius!

First, I'm liking this Harry Osborne backstory. We see his father get killed in an explosion over Manhattan that was the catastrophie from the first issue and his final words to Harry. Thus providing the subtle emotional drive that he has throughout the story. Second, we see that Norman and the Kingpin had a partnership that Harry is unsure he wants to maintain. Third, the Stark/Stane logo's A is the Avengers A.

And it's Harry-freaking-Osborne who gives Peter the speech!

While this private conversation between Harry and Peter about their other lives and the contrast on how each of them handle their secrets is interesting, I can't help but notice how when Harry says, "Save the world" we don't fully see his face, particularly his eyes. Every panel we see his full face except for this one moment. Just a feeling that he may be hiding something.

Whoa, some major world-building drops! Looks like after Tony Stark was gone, Obidiah Stane took over (or they merged while Star was still alive, a little unclear), but now Oscorp had an aggressive take-over of Stane/Stark! And Gwen and Harry are in charge?!

Well, that was a surprising end. Darth Maul does have a flair for the dramatic. Do all Sith have that?

Ha! The perfect secret rendezvous: below a meeting of senators. And Lorn Pavana will probably have a coincidental meeting with one Naboo senator that will save his butt from the pursuing Sith Lord.

Three stuns to the back and Maul was only out for a few seconds. Lol

The slimy mother$@%#&@^@%

Whaaaaaat? A piece of the Force-resistant creature? When did he have time to get this?

So, not a total loss. Lorn is lucky he has a droid with perfect recall after being frozen as well.

Short-term memory loss from the carbon freezing? Oh, that's convenient and a pity. All that character growth for nothing.

We're seeing hints of Maul's overconfidence and tunnel vision that he has in battle. He is not fully aware of his surroundings, which is what his opponents exploit. First, Darsha, then Obi-Wan on Naboo. I'm trying to recall if he had the same problem in TCW, Rebels, and the new show.

36 hours or more with Darsha was all Lorn needed to flip from hating the Jedi to caring about her. I love it.

I like how in this flashback to a lightsaber training session with Yoda, it still demonstrates Yoda as someone who uses slowness of speed and heightened reflexes to avoid lightsaber strikes from his fellow Council members rather than using the Force to propel him and enhance his speed. AOTC is still a year away.

Ha! Callback! A carbon-freezing chamber with a Sith Lord waiting for our Jedi-trainee. Nice.

"You will go get a haircut."
"I will go get a haircut."
Now that's an Obi-Wan-style of mind trick.

Ooooh, Sith lightsaber construction. The old-fashioned, pre-Disney way, which is philosophically superior to the new Disney way; Sith construct their lightsaber crystals through a furnace where they meditate and imbue crystal with the dark side, a demonstration of their power and self-reliance rather than depending on killing Jedi and corrupting their crystals, risking discovery and being hunted down.

This book is just drip-feeding us clues of Lorn's backstory.

"'Are Jedi that good?'
"'No, they're not. I'm only an apprentice. My master is far more skilled than I.'"
I see where Obi-Wan gets his cheek.

I see that psychokinesis has not been introduced into the Jedi array of powers yet. Unless Reeves hasn't read Dark Horse when he was writing this or the Del Rey editor to know of Quinlan Vos.

Imagine if any of the Terminators felt rage and frustration every time that John or Sarah Connor escaped from it by the thinnest of margins. This is Darth Maul rn.