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A new hypothesis: The true intrinsic flaw of all of Miranda's amusement park rides is crippling myopia. Railrunner, a 20-foot long red coaster - the only single coaster in existence with red on his hull - can have prolonged conversations and close-range combat with assailants while wearing little more than a coat and nobody notices he's red until his hood comes down? That's not an oversight in the heat of battle, that's clinical blindness. So maybe Miranda's intended hidden depth to Railrunner is that those initial outbursts of violence weren't expressly meant to be lethal - he simply missed on the warning swings and ended up murdering people. He's suffering from a nervous breakdown where his means of coping with the blood on his hands is to attempt to wash it away with more blood and believe that he truly, sincerely, is a killer at heart. Alternately, while attempting to cope with the Stockholm Syndrome of being in Miranda Leek's world for so long I come up with the following. Railrunner is a manifested psychotic episode of Rodney; Who stressed by unemployment, social isolation from friends, and a collapsing relationship with Clare made his way to the run-down old amusement park that his parents never took him to. This was a trauma that scarred him for life, he convinced himself that he actually hated amusement parks until his world collapsed and he made his way there - the amusement park on the edge of a growing city, and convinced himself that he was employed; that he made new friends; that Clare would love him again; that he was special and had a destiny. But deep down he was still ashamed because he couldn't buy fully into this new fantasy and so he began to lash out at the 'real world' in a childish attempt to stand apart from it. It escalated from a random barfight to literally killing some petty thugs and then a showdown with the police - when they finally captured him and locked him away, he completely disassociated with reality and believed himself to have gone to 'Amusement Park Between' where he was a messianic figure. Fragments of reality came through in the form of these 'Fallen' - manifestations of the nurses and doctors attempting to cure him of his madness - and culminating in his brief return to the 'real world' when Clare came to visit him at the hospital. Maybe Miranda's long play with these books is that they aren't just horrible fanfiction filled with plagiarism from countless other teen-lit & television sources from the past decade - but a knowing nod that Rodney's fantasy is influenced by these things. The books aren't written from an omniscient perspective of a storyteller, but instead as a narration of the clinical notes of one of the undoubtedly countless doctors attempting to understand the delusions of a man driven to madness by the recession.
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May 17, 2013 01:38
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Why do amusement park rides insist on using human furniture, clothes, etc? Or is Miranda just too lazy to at least be a hack and toss "Coaster" as prefix to everything: Coasterthrone Coastercoat Coasterbed It would be really stupid, still, but at least slightly open-to-the-imagination.
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May 17, 2013 19:42
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Someone should consider getting Ulillillia and Miranda in touch. They seem like they share a lot of common interests.
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May 30, 2013 01:29
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Jeek posted:Don't you dare compare this wretch to the most endearing OCD patient on the internet. But they both share this amazing interest in trying to shoehorn JRPG logic into everything.
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May 30, 2013 01:56
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attackbunny posted:I just wish there was something I could do for him to ease his suffering. loving hell, Merrylegs. He's repeatedly threatened to kill you. It's also amusing that from the narrator's perspective, we're talking about serious pain for no apparent benefit and with no clear cure. But we're going to call this a gift anyway!
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May 30, 2013 17:50
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SSNeoman posted:Freud would have a field day with all these female characters grabbing poles of some sort Nanotorches Nanostone Nanoblades Yep, that simple prefix basically helps fix the insane anachronisms.
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Jun 3, 2013 20:34
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attackbunny posted:"We'll let these guys take a look at the only red roller coaster train in existence and see if they go 'oh yeah, that's the red roller coaster train!'" Maybe these merry outlaws are all colorblind, ok. It's the sort of deep character backgrounds Miranda builds into her stories.
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Jun 3, 2013 23:33
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JosephWongKS posted:But all roller coasters have "the sight of a dragon". Thunderbark said so in Chapter 7. ...unreliable
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Jun 4, 2013 01:04
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Having the villain shout "See you never!" and leap out of the building in the middle of what really ought to have been the final confrontation suddenly makes me think Luke should have shouted "gently caress off, shitlord!" before falling off the catwalk on Cloud City. Classic Cinema, as reimagined by Miranda Leek: Star Wars: A New Hope Luke knew that he was the last chance at success. He had to hit the exhaust port perfectly or all was lost. But then he hit it perfectly and the Death Star blew up. Spartacus "Which one of you is Spartacus?" the Legionnaire sighed. But Spartacus had foreseen this happening and was not there. Se7en "What's in the loving box?!" David shouted. "You were just getting in his way, David, you shouldn't have upset him" his partner sighed.
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Jun 16, 2013 07:25
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Iced Cocoa posted:And now that Railrunner and Ironwheel are back in the real world, how big do you think the body count will be? Or who is going to kill someone first? My bet is that Railrunner kills at least a dozen police officers who were "in his way" and then gets to Clare's house and she doesn't have a scratch on her.
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Jun 16, 2013 18:15
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What's most amusing to me is the way Miranda has, once again, completely invalidated a chapter's purpose in the final paragraph: We have an entire chapter about Ironwheel and Freakshow searching for Railrunner. Putting aside the fact that the bartender instantly remembers Rodney's address - sidenote: rampant alcoholism? - he ends up giving them the "here's where you find them" information. This could be a lead in to another chapter of them scouring Rodney and Clare's homes, giving the reader an impression of the efforts and thoroughness of their search. But instead it's just "Oh hey Bones hasn't come back and he was in the woods, I bet we'll find them there." This completely removes the need to go search their homes, which she just built up for most of a chapter before immediately handwaving away any effort on the part of the characters. Excuse me the pun, but the most frustrating part of this story is how much it's clearly just on-rails storytelling. 
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Jun 22, 2013 15:37
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