Round 9.4 [The Atheist v. Atmosphere]

Hmmm... I'm not entirely sure what we're supposed to do now.

Me neither...my god. Did we actually make too few rules?

Anyway, I agree with Shockah that the rabble should be rousing--if you have the slightest inkling of an opinion on this one, please do let us know.

So, without further adieu:

The Atheist

Interesting that you want to place this one on Earth, because the way that I've been looking at it, it would be impossible to do that. First off, we need the entire population believing in one god. Secondly, in my view, we actually need to disprove that this god exists--or, at least, that the historical evidence for this god was made by their imprisoned forefathers.

How can we disprove a god that real people actually believe in (when some people can't even draw cartoons of one version of him)? By touching that issue at all, we'll be either burdened by our own opinions or by attempts to attempt to show that we don't have any. Moving it to a self-contained (and totally defined-by-us) community had the advantage of avoiding the trappings of religion here on Earth.

But understanding your reason for wanting to keep this on Earth is so that we have a candidate that is not on another planet (although Rasputin the Translator take place on Earth, at least), but I don't know if I'm convinced yet. Maybe it's because the story of your protagonist just wasn't as compelling to me. And that could be because I didn't see the story in the description--and, to be fair, that's not a bad thing--it's just that since I had seen this taking place on a different land than Earth, I wanted to know more about how it's going to play out with this guy.

So, I'll withhold any further pondering until you come up with some more terrestrial ideas on this one--I'm curious and willing to be open minded about it, but I'll need to be pointed in a direction to ponder it. Get crackin' on Winter Light!

Atmosphere
First off, it's funny that we both gave a character autism. I didn't read yours before doing mine, so that was totally coincidence.

I do agree that our bios are very similar, and could be condensed into one. Although, for some reason (and I'm not sure if this is purely in my head or is on the page) your guy seems more redeemable.

Part of my interest in this story has to do with confronting a nearly unredeemable protagonist. Somebody who really did something terrible and selfish and who really deserved the punishment given to him. That's why I was arguing that the company and government shouldn't be the bad guys in this. It's really about one man coming to terms with what he did and trying to turn around and personally redeem himself.

If we have a character with such a difficult past, I think interest and sympathy will be forged through seeing his remorse. Then, we could really play with people by having his myopia be endangering to other people again--as if his attempts to redeem himself are looking like they'll just lead him down the same path again.