Did Brandon take the easy way out in Reckoners?

[+Oltux72]

Reckoners is, if you will, a story about magic or super powers arising anew in a multiversal setting.

The core addition is that those powers do something to your psyche. Is that because he dared not face the bleakness and uncomfortable questions the alternative would have brought? In other series we praise Brandon for complex believable characters. In Reckoners the superpowered are essentially victims of an extraterrestial influence. They do bad things because they are made to be evil.

Is that because the alternative would have been to wonder what would have happened the first time a superpowered male teenager would not have taken "no" for an answer after a date and when the cops arrived told them to get lost or else and implemented the or else? Did Brandon think that the X-Men had already been made and he took the easy way of finding an alternative?

[NameIess]

2 hours ago, Oltux72 said:

Reckoners is, if you will, a story about magic or super powers arising anew in a multiversal setting.

The core addition is that those powers do something to your psyche. Is that because he dared not face the bleakness and uncomfortable questions the alternative would have brought? In other series we praise Brandon for complex believable characters. In Reckoners the superpowered are essentially victims of an extraterrestial influence. They do bad things because they are made to be evil.

Is that because the alternative would have been to wonder what would have happened the first time a superpowered male teenager would not have taken "no" for an answer after a date and when the cops arrived told them to get lost or else and implemented the or else? Did Brandon think that the X-Men had already been made and he took the easy way of finding an alternative?

I would say that the plot twist that epics are corrupted by their powers is not the "easy way out". It provides a limitation for the epics on the Reckoner's side, while also explaining why there's a world filled with tons of evil epics, which would realistically never happen. Obviously, there would be a lot of evil epics, (although most Epics would just be cowardly or greedy) but there would also be good epics.

As for Brandon not wanting to explore a world where people are solely responsible for their own actions, Calamity ended with Calamity leaving, meaning that Epics will now be freed from the effects of his corruption. And Brandon seems to be continuing the series with Lux (Which I have yet to read) and possibly a Mizzy book. So I don't think it's the easy way out. I think it was a choice to explain why every Epic was evil.

[king of nowhere]

Consider that obliteration was freed from the influence of calamity already, and he was the worst of the bunch.

so no, it does not take away from the "complex, believable characters". in fact, it's all epics being evil that would have been antithetical to that - people are people, they are neither particularly good nor evil, they fall everywhere in the spectrum. a normal, healty world has enough good epics to protect from the bad epics. on earth, an external influence broke the balance and made all epics evil - except maybe a very few with exceptional willpower or exceptional motivation

[EmulatonStromenkiin]

On 1/26/2022 at 9:58 AM, king of nowhere said:

Consider that obliteration was freed from the influence of calamity already, and he was the worst of the bunch.

so no, it does not take away from the "complex, believable characters". in fact, it's all epics being evil that would have been antithetical to that - people are people, they are neither particularly good nor evil, they fall everywhere in the spectrum. a normal, healty world has enough good epics to protect from the bad epics. on earth, an external influence broke the balance and made all epics evil - except maybe a very few with exceptional willpower or exceptional motivation

I quite agree, and they tend to balance out, so life goes on neutrally.