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Eileene and I were discussing the TV series Heroes recently, and she pointed out that Heroes is doing something unusual for shows pandering to the fanboy market, sweeping away many of its established characters with the season turnover. Abruptly changing a winning formula is a gutsy decision, especially when fanboys really, really like sheer volume in a setting: more characters, more locations, more supplemental source material than normal people can stomach. Fanboys especially thrive on the polynomial expansion of the number of relationships between members of a growing dramatis personae, to the point that they will provide their own fiction to explore whatever relationships the series does not pursue. Killing off characters, or even just shuffling them offstage once their part is done, gets in the way of that kind of volume. Plus some fans will inevitably lose their favorite character. Nevertheless, fans are taking sweeping changes of the guard in stride.

I maintain that this is because Heroes also offers definite, satisfying conclusions to character arcs, another departure from the norm. All too often, shows like this string both characters and stories long past their narrative life span, precisely to milk the fanboys for all they’re worth. It’s easy to jerk the audience around when you’ve got time travel, alien technology, magic, and/or super-powers floating around to explain half-baked teasers, and—so far—Heroes has given a clear signal they will not cross the same line The X-Files, Twin Peaks, and Lost have, where the audience finally decides they’re just getting jerked around, and quit in disgust.

I, for one, really like the approach. I’ll trade the lingering promise of my favorite character’s return for a satisfying ending any day, even if that ending is an unpleasant one. While Eileene and I talked about this, I suddenly realized this was precisely something I’d wished for years ago, in a different setting.

The now-defunct West End Games once put out a large role-playing setting called Torg. The basic premise is that natural law operates in different ways in infinite parallel worlds. High technology exists in some worlds, not in others. Likewise magic, spiritual powers, and even social abstractions like uniform time measurement. A handful of powerful raiders have learned to pierce the boundaries between worlds and harvest energy from worlds they conquer, a thermodynamic engine of cosmic proportions. And now they put aside natural rivalry over possibility energy to raid our earth, a source too rich for any one raider to absorb safely.

As a result, a half dozen chunks of our world have been transformed. England and Scandinavia are locked in a high fantasy civil war, including Vikings, giants, and dragons. France has been taken over by a brutal high-tech theocracy. The pulp villain “Doctor Mobius” rules a pulp-action empire from Egypt. Indonesia has become a land of gothic horror, Japan has become a megacorporate dystopia, and intelligent dinosaurs walk the ruins of the eastern U.S. Part of the process of conquest involves transforming territory, and especially the people who live there, to the natural laws of the conquering cosm: where the dinosaurs invade, our armies can’t fight very well because our guns don’t work in their occupied territory, and slowly our soldiers “go native,” becoming primitives who can’t even conceive of things like nations and armies.

The war to repel these invaders from other realities would be a terrific milieu for an ensemble cast. Enormous possibilities to mix-and-match characters to exotic settings (and equally exotic characters) would make it a fanboy favorite. It would also be a vast production to undertake. My vision for such a series didn’t make any promises. This is a war for our very reality, and individual good guys often lose big in wars. As episodes progressed, the ranks of starting characters would get weeded out. Some would die big, dramatic deaths, others would find and settle into less dramatic seats from which to pursue the war, and some would simply become statistics. A show like that would be awesome to watch, but I had no illusions that I would never see it happen.

It was a pleasant surprise to realize that’s what we’ve got in Heroes. Not the reality wars, but a premise equally compelling to geeks who like superpowers and battle suits and psionics in equal measure. More to the point, it has the same sort of narrative structure I wished for, with numerous intriguing mix-and-match possibilities, and no guarantees. Unlike most fans, I’m quite looking forward to the familiar old characters getting replaced, if only to see how well it works.