[SPOILERS!@#$!@#$ AGI THAT MEANS YOU.]
I read the Whedonesque thread on this issue and thought:
'Huh. Long thread.'
That's a whole heck of a lot of comments without (near as I can tell) anyone mentioning how goddamn stupid all the 'nature doesn't put anything here it doesn't need' stuff was. 1) That's not true. 2) 'Equilibrium' and 'local minima/maxima' and 'nonlinear dynamics' are a leetle more complicated than they're being made out to be, and the man who made Dollhouse Season One, of all people, knows the value of sticking with moral complexity even when it doesn't lead to a Big Splashy Comic Book Moment. 3) Yes to balance, yes to biological continuity and interdependence, yes to literalized forces of nature in a fantasy story - I've suspended my goddamn disbelief so hard it will NEVER AGAIN RETURN TO EARTH!!#$!@$# - but for god's sake can someone in the editorial chain please at least pretend to take their adult readers seriously for, um, a page or two? At least invent an actual fucking phlebotinum instead of treating this universe-altering event totally abstractly. Can our explanations please involve actual explaining sometimes? What is this, LOST?!
Oh, and:
4) Two pages of mythologydump stretched over 20 pages of comic is awesome if you're Alan Moore or Brian K. Vaughn and evidently not that awesome if you're Brad Meltzer. (And let it be said, I know the man can write his ass off. Just not, y'know, this.)
I don't much care about the Angel-is-Buffy's-true-love bit - she's cookie dough, she's cookies, whatever, as long as we can connect the emotional dots the story works - but this fictional world means more to me than I can possibly explain, and I don't like the idea that the 'FX budget' of comics is going to send it right off the rails. In narrative terms, never mind conceptual ones.
Sigh.
