All great settings deserve a pen-and-paper roleplaying game

A map of the Avatar: The Last Airbender world, from AlisaChristopher's DeviantArt

Whenever I really get into a novel, a comic book, a TV series, a movie, or a computer game, I always want there to be a pen-and-paper roleplaying game set in the same world. I want to see maps of the world, stats for the various people and monsters that live there, descriptions of the roles my character can fill, and suggestions for what adventures I can have there. I already have a tendency to watch TV shows as if the main characters were PCs in a roleplaying game, so it's a small jump to imagining myself participating in another game in the same setting.

King City: A Guy, A Cat, a City

Image from Brandon Graham's DeviantArt

Brandon Graham's King City is brilliant. The comics tell the story of a young man named Joe, his cat Earthling, and their adventures in King City. Joe is a Cat Master, an expert at the art of injecting his cat with a variety of juices that give the cat various superpowers. Early in the book, he injects Earthling and feeds the cat a key, and Earthling makes a perfect copy: copy cat. Later, we learn that the cat has a perfect memory: information cat-alog. Not all of his powers are pun-based, but just enough of them are. King City rules.

Snow White and the Huntsman: Keep Hunting

"Mirror... mirror............ onthewall," says Charlize Theron, pacing back and forth, when she first addresses her magic mirror in Snow White and the Huntsman. It's as though she knew she had to deliver the most iconic and necessary line in any Snow White movie, but didn't want to do it that way. You know, the way pretty much anyone would have said it. She tried to do it a different way, a dramatic and tense way. And it just kind of made me snort with stifled laughter. This is pretty much the pattern for the whole movie: it's like they're trying to do things their way, but something keeps getting in the way

Discovered on the Intertron: Two Best Friends Play...

So recently, I stumbled across a series of YouTube video calls Two Best Friends Play.... The premise is simple: two dudes in their twenties record themselves talking while playing a video game. It's all about the hilarious banter, usually revolving around making fun of the game, making fun of each other, and hilarious tangents they go off on. Matt is has a gentle, kind of naive soul, and Pat has anger management issues. Naturally, they're both playing up these personas, but the clash of personalities is comedy gold. I should warn you that the things they say are at times misogynistic, vulgar, and crude. Some of their jokes are about harming women or are blatantly racist. That genuinely bothers me, and if they wouldn't go there, I could enjoy their videos much more.

I first stumbled across the videos when I was doing my usual search for ponies, and I found this:

Why You Really Should Give Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes a Watch

 There are some spoilers ahead, but I'll try to keep them to the first part of the show.

One of my cohorts recently threw down the gauntlet (or possibly spandex glove) by comparing Young Justice to Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. As he pointed out, they are for different age groups, so it might not be entirely fair to compare them. While YJ gets to have complex storylines full of brooding and woe (and veiled references to drug use, with Red Arrow's latest story arc), A:EMH is much more about fighting bad guys and stopping cartoonishly evil schemes that usually consist of "taking over ____," revenge, and theft. This isn't to say that it's completely silly: Captain America still mourns over the loss of his entire world, Hawkeye and Black Widow have tension while going back and forth on just how evil Widow is, and at one point the Hulk is rejected and goes off to be alone. These moments are great, but they're fairly rare, because the show is about something else: it's about saving the world, and being mighty while doing it.

 The Hulk must go / So you cannot see the depth / Of his loneliness.