Yeah, this escalation ladder thing proves to be more difficult to handle than I thought… to quote any of a number of political leaders throughout history…a number that’s currently growing pretty steadily again…

But I meant my remark mostly in regards to this chapter’s plot*. I found it pretty difficult to expand on the theme of knuckle dusters, for example. Naturally, there are a number of real-life examples of such devices being augmented in various ways: added weight, spikes, poison, electricity etc. But none of them felt really escalatory enough, given that, as I mentioned before, Snuka had the f**king Death Star in his backpack. The Infinity Glove, now that’s a different matter…categorically related to knuckle dusters, but definitely highly, highly escalatory. So here I might run into problems at the other end of the scale: This might actually amount to overkill. ._.

While the problems with the twins was a different one: how do you escalate from something that you didn’t define in the first place? The twins’… uh, “displays” have had to be hidden behind the merciful veil of censorship for a while now, and thus left to the imagination of the audience. So I basically can’t do anything but ask the audience to imagine something that is somehow considerably worse than whatever it was they imagined the last time. ._. Sorry, and good luck.
And the only way I could imagine to visualize this prompt is showing the Queen’s reaction to the very idea…having known the twins for so long, she might have an inkling of an idea what they are talking about, and her reaction might serve as something of a guideline to the audience as to how terrible they have to imagine whatever kind of escalation the twins are considering.

Yeah, I really should have ended this spiral of escalation one twist earlier.** ._.

More on Thursday.

* Although, naturally, I wouldn’t want to discourage any global political leaders who might happen to read this from heeding the lesson nevertheless. =P

** The above remark applies here, as well.