Yeah. And I agree, you have to take into account the real-world-ness of the thing and just say "this happens now, and they have to deal with it."

I'm more concerned about the enthusiastic defense of dismantling the system, because, as Trey cleverly put, "if you insist on removing the value from things that were intended to have it, you are removing the market incentive to make those things."

...

*blink*

Are you trolling?

I dunno, the word "clear" was in there a lot.

/is kidding, people

Saw this. And... while they condensed time a bit... yeah. That's this.

Heh.

You-shots from Pink Five are. It still counts!

Well, fully swap all the genders in a classic romance-y movie. The Princess Bride, for instance.

Princess Bride reverse-spoilers to follow.

A young boy prince hits on the chick who feeds the horses. She's really cute. They flirt, eventually kiss. She dies.  He says "I will never love again."

Years later, he is taken hostage by a crew of evil lady-pirates, who have the numbers to overpower him, but he has the wit and resolve.

Later, after a crazy lady piratelord has overcome the lady-pirates in challenges of steel, brawn, and reasoning, she at last meets our hero, who tells her to go pound sand, and punches her down a ravine. She says "as it is with our previously established pithy in-joke," and collapses to the base of the mountain. He says "oh shit, the girl I loved!" and rolls down to her.

She leads him through a terrible swamp, after which they are separated by the forces acting on the whims of his evil ex-slash-sort-of-kind-of-current girlfriend. He spends a lot of time trying to convince his ex-girlfriend to let him be with his true better half, and she spends that time conspiring with her torture-prone evil henchman to soul-suck her to death.

I would have sorted out where I was going with this after typing up a first draft of the post, but right now, that actually sounds awesome. So I don't know what my point was going to be and I don't know how the rest of The Prince Bride plays out, but it sounds cool to me. Carry on.