- Capitalist realism
- Evil races put in the story only to be killed without moral consideration
- Humanoid/appealing-looking races all on the side of good, ugly/bizarre-looking races all on the side of evil
- One race is the warrior race, another is the merchant race, another is the science race, etc. with no meaningful cultural variation no matter how vast and spread out the species is
- All the protagonists are nobles/corporate heirs/other people of obscene wealth and privilege
- Not understanding military strategy or how it would be fundamentally altered by fire-breathing dragons/magic unicorns/vast interstellar distances/bombs that can annihilate planets
- Libertarian soapboxing
Not understanding military strategy or how it would be fundamentally altered by fire-breathing dragons/magic unicorns/vast interstellar distances/bombs that can annihilate planets
I could not get over this in one of the new Star Wars movies when they establish that you can use hyperdrives on a ship to easily kamikaze a star destroyer. Like, writers, you just invalidated the entire Wars in Star Wars. No more fighters, no more blasters, no more ground troops, no storm troopers or AT-AT's. The entire galaxies' military doctrine would shift to strapping hyperdrives to rocks and lobbing them long distance an enemy home planet. Nothing would look the same!!!!
Ender's Game has a lot of problems but at least the war in that one is shown to be the result of a misunderstanding, and it repeatedly emphasizes that genociding the bugs was in fact Very Bad
Starship Troopers can fuck right off though
Wasn’t that Ender’s older brother? Been a while since I read the books.
Yeah Peter ends up as a big shot leader on earth once the coalition govt collapses
Redsails has a good take (IMO) on Ender’s Game that basically agrees with your chud relative:
https://redsails.org/creating-the-innocent-killer/
Also, there are characters named Mazer Rackham, Bonzo Madrid, and, of course, Ender Wiggin.
The Speaker for the Dead series is pretty wacky at times, but the throughline of the first book is Ender seeking redemption for destroying the Formic homeworld by finding a planet to place the last remaining queen - simultaneously he comes into contact with a pre-industrial alien species, and by helping people come to understand them, he prevents a similar genocide from happening.
I fukken love that book and its sequels, even though Card is :yikes:
Speaker for the Dead and it's sequel are probably my favorite depictions of alien life. Like, truly different though patterns and cultures without just being meaninglessly evil.
There was, though, a famously non-charitable reading of it as Hitler apologia, since Space Hitler (Ender Wiggin) goes to a Portuguese-speaking colony to prove that his genocide was just a misunderstanding and he's just a regular guy who also happens to be a genius at interspecies diplomacy. I think it was at least a little tongue-in-cheek, seeing as Card has perfectly plausible mundane explanations for those influences (missionary work in Brazil, for instance).
Card still freaked out and wrote a long, rambling reply to it that came across as unhinged. As far as I can tell it's been purged from the written record. Can't find it anywhere.
Wait, I thought that the original Starship Troopers was anti imperialist???
Verhoven's film is a satire of the book, which is legitimately fascist.
That's what's so bizarre about the contemporary Starship Troopers content, is it's a fascist's re-imagining of an anti-fascist's re-imagining of a fascist's setting.
Real simulacra hours, who up?
Verhoven’s film is unironically better than the book, both as a piece of entertainment, and for having a better message.
In the book it opens with them doing space colonialism with the space South Vietnamese aliens, in their cool robot suits that can shoot out nukes like they're passing out Halloween candy. Very :so-true:
Verhoeven found the book so depressing he literally threw it in the trash and decided to direct it as a satire of the source material
I forgive Star Trek for having aliens that all share common cultural traits because at least some writers recognized the show did that and try to explain why it's like that. Several alien species mention that they had massive, apocalyptic wars before developing space travel. Vulcans did it, Ferengi did it, several others too, including humans. They then had to rebuild, but it always ended up uniting the planet under a common ideology and culture over thousands of years. Humans are the weird ones, we develop utopian space socialism in only a few decades after global nuclear war, whereas Vulcans took 1500 years.
A few episodes try to say it's because Earth is more ecologically diverse than other planets with alien life, like the Vulcan planet is a huge desert and the Klingon planet is covered in uniform volcanoes/mountains. A few try saying humans have much squishier brains than other species and that results in more adaptable thoughts.
Not to be a gigantic nerd but I want to point out that Ferengi didn't have an apocalyptic war or any inter-Ferengi genocide or slavery (feeemoids don't count, hu-mon :quark: ) and they feel all morally superior because of that
They just profit from those kinda things
I see all of this and my mind just condenses it all into "terrible fucking writing" and throws it in the trash
Any author who does this is just bad at writing
People in the far future having the same social sensibilities we do now despite drastically different upbringings and material conditions
When they just make it Earth but replace social demographics with aliens/fantasy races.
What's the point of making an entirely new world if you're just going to make it the same as Earth.
Another is when they make an alien animals and it's just an Earth animal but hairless. Like the Predators dogs are just hairless dogs.
and here are the aliens that are the danish, and here are the aliens that are the chinese and
A setting I've been working on forever started this way, but as I got older I realized it accidentally made a lot of cultures non-human only which felt really gross once I thought about it. I'm now coming up with ways the setting can have people of every real world race represented in every culture and corner of the world, and leaving the fantasy races to be their own things.
I think mostly just making a fantasy world resemble earth is just a very easy shortcut in making a believable world.
When an alien race is known for doing one specific thing, especially when that thing just so happens to be what the one named member of that race happened to be doing in the original movie/episode/book.
I mostly got this way from reading Star Wars novels. Greedo was a green guy who got blasted by a bounty he was hunting, but (in the legends canon anyway) someone decided that the entire Rodian species were infamous bounty hunters and that their entire culture revolved around the hunting season and it's so dumb. These guys are into interstellar travel, there's no way their culture is a monolith that centers around such a specific and fringe profession.
The Star Wars EU is terrible for this but there is an even worse, similar thing that it does
For a while anyone writing an EU book wanted some kind of movie tie-in. Well they weren't always telling a story about Luke Fucking Skywalker all the time, but they still really wanted that movie legitimacy.
So the authors would go down a massive list of minor characters and eventually give names to the fucking extras. I read in some fucking wiki that the bartender in Mos Eisley is a galaxy-renowned chemist who can also quote "mix any drink".
It turns out that every solitary shot in the original trilogy was a serendipitous meeting of literally the most fascinating street beggar laying on the ground catching dust from a broom held by the Emperor's own black ops posing as a janitor.
The two things Disney did right were Andor and the merciful euthanasia upon all that EU material.
and the merciful euthanasia upon all that EU material.
fuck that, the replacement is worse.
the replacement is awful but god, a lot of the EU material is... oh man. Rise of Skywalker feels like it was ripped from the EU
The author can imagine life in another solar system, but can't imagine a woman having a job.
cold piercing steely blue eyes
Bad writing is its own peculiar genre. Authors never miss a chance to doggerel it up with stuff like that and also: strikingly attractive, piping hot coffee, barren wastelands, etc.
I'm not lying when I say I'd love to read a story written by AI via the prompt "Write me a laughably bad 10,000 word sci-fi story with romance that includes as many bad tropes as possible." And if I howled and chuckled at the text - I'd give the AI nearly the same prompt but make it a 100,000 word novel.
people smirking
Oh, man. That too!
"She had to break eye contact with his piercing blue eyes. Meanwhile he took another sip of his piping hot coffee. He then smirked and chuckled."
I can’t continue.
My god, man. That's what AI is for. You'll go insane!
I realize now my prompt needs some tweaking. I definitely want it old school. And the final comment is paramount.
“Write me a laughably bad 10,000 word sci-fi story. Add in some romance. Include as many bad tropes as possible. Don't use any sources newer than 1990. The key idea is to make it so-bad-it's-good."
No. Holy crap. Is it a parody? Or is it unironic? In any case - it looks truly great...
"You make love well wench," Admitted Grignr as he reached for the vessel of potent wine his charge had been quaffing.
Note to self: How is it that I entirely forgot about the word "quaff"? Shame on me! It's funny even by itself: quaff.
It was indeed unironic. Became a staple of fantasy conventions over the years. Back in the day I played a drinking game where we tried to read it aloud without laughing. The fun is lessened a bit when we learn that it was a 17-year-old's first attempt at a novel that somehow made it out into the world . . . but it did make it out into the world, and it does contain the line "You make love well wench" so I think it's fair game.
a 17-year-old’s first attempt at a novel that somehow made it out into the world
Oh, that does take away most of the humor. I'm happy that nothing I did as a teenager exists in the digital world. I'd die of cringe.
I first discovered it when I was around that age, and thought it was the funniest thing ever, but that was more than half a lifetime ago so now I cringe somewhat on Theis's behalf rather than in mockery of him. But he died in 2002 so now it's the property of humankind, right? It's a conundrum.
But he died in 2002 so now it’s the property of humankind, right? It’s a conundrum.
I'll read it in a different way. I'll laugh at the text but not the author. I hate to think that in some alternate universe I wrote an equally awful sci-fi novel as a 17 year-old and everybody laughs at it.
How to tell you're in a soft science fiction novel: Something has gone terribly wrong with the earth’s orbit, but modern gender roles are still pretty much intact.
https://the-toast.net/2015/01/28/tell-soft-science-fiction-novel/
The ship’s doctor has a drinking problem.
I wonder how old that trope is. Could it go back all the way to the beginning of the the Age of Sail (~1500)?
The true meaning of this silent, ancient ziggurat will at last be revealed, if you could just translate the pictograms.
We've all been there.
I legitimately love it when the ship's doctor has a drinking problem and/or is a crotchety asshole who hates his own life but is excessively worried about the health of the crew/captain
Also yes the robot crew member should jerk it, and everybody should feel weird about it
It's pretty minor but whenever they fly the ship up to a nebula like it's a cloud that would have discernable shapes and edges on the same scale as a space ship. Especially when it's like a storm cloud with lightning or something. Real nebulae are very big and very thin and very dim. I think they're probably invisible up close, and they certainly wouldn't have any discernable features up close, whatever they look like would be very very flat when you're thousands of light years closer.
Basically the same thing about flying through an asteroid belt. They often show it as a chaotic dangerous mess of rocks. There's a lot of objects at that distance from the sun but you would probably fly through that region without seeing anything, space is still mostly empty.
asteroid belt. They often show it as a chaotic dangerous mess of rocks...
When I was a teenager - The Empire Strikes Back led me to believe that. And I didn't even realize the misconception deeply lodged in my unconscious until ~35 years later when I saw a reddit comment explaining how the filmic trope is great for plots and there can be fantastic spaceship chase scenes but it's total nonsense. It's funny how we - cough - astronomically simplify the universe to match our earth-bound reality.
I guess if it was a realistic chase scene where the ships encountered an asteroid would be like watching snails chase each other down a very straight highway mile after mile after mile. The scene would last an eon. Hundreds of hours? Not exactly riveting cinema.
Millennium Falcon Asteroid Field Scene - The Empire Strikes Back 1980
I actually like old-tymey sci-fi that takes this literally and gives us shit like space whales and, by extension, space whaling
Both sci-fi and fantasy are super fucking guilty of making everything that’s supposed to be mysterious/backwards/magic in universe, for lack of a better wording, sound Arabic. Or make literally every desert people have Arab aesthetics. There are certain things like architecture and clothing that simply make sense in this setting, but the language? The names? Really was that necessary? It’s lazy at best and racist at its worst.
Fine if the entire setting is framed like this, but something just doesn’t sit right when a European writer starts naming exclusively one culture/area/religion like this. Immediate red flag.
Also extremely prevalent and annoying: infantilization of female characters though obviously this can span literally every genre
People write their fantasies, and unfortunately many authors are mediocre men whose fantasy is to come across a woman who is way out of their league but she’s too traumatized or socially unaware to know it.
Gonna fight back against the first one by making a race of "exotic" lizardfolk where the most common name is Jared and they all eat cheeseburgers or something
Geico is doing their part with a geckofolk named Martin that talks about insurance.
Lmfao. And the fact that your comment is so funny speaks volumes to how right my comment is
Race of redneck snake/lizardfolk who hunt with ridiculous big 17th century blunderbusses but only for selling the pelts and subsist entirely on hot wings
for lack of a better wording, sound Arabic.
I also notice that in thrillers (or tv episodes) if there's a drone/helicopter scene over a desert in the Mideast (or North Africa) - the music sometimes has plaintive wordless with - I don't know what to call it - "Arabic" vocalizations. It's become a go-to musical thing for Hollywood.
The only only time I've ever liked anything even remotely like that is in Khyber Pass by Ministry.
I'm guilty of writing one culture/area/religion as real world analogues. Mostly because I find it easier to vaguely base the world's shape and climate on ours because I'm too dumb to know how planets can realistically form.
There’s nothing wrong with doing that imo, just when it starts to get a little bit too direct is when it verges on being weird. A story almost everybody under the age of 35 loves is ATLA and its corresponding universe which is very much a real world analogue. The difference is that it’s done respectfully and clearly well thought out to ensure it remained that way. (Disclaimer: there are also some quite glaring shortcomings in ATLA though, kindly brought up by @muddi here)
Frank Herbert’s Dune, the piece of art it is, is definitely riding that fine line of being weird (in terms of naming of course, let alone the MANY other weird things in the story). Of course Dune is a product of its time, but
spoiler
a desert people, with an arab-esque aesthetic and language, on a planet being colonized for its one resource, coming across a prophetic leader, and proceeding to launch a religious war literally named a jihad in the name of said prophet, is a bit on the nose lol.
I should have mentioned that specifically, because it is actually very disrespectful and you are correct. Of course the show isn’t perfect, and honestly it’s really amazing how so much of it IS very respectful and then they somehow just totally drop the ball like that in regards to Guru Pathik and Indian cultural references, religious influences, etc, which could have been some of the most powerful pieces of story telling and imagery that already naturally fit into the story very well.
I’ll add a disclaimer in my comment to read yours in addition
A story almost everybody under the age of 35 loves is ATLA
Is it really that popular?
The only good thing to come of Korra was the JackSaint videos about its heavy-handed misrepresentation of political ideology, and the fact that a lesbian relationship wasn't portrayed as :awooga:
Agreed. I would’ve liked to see what the writers could have created given a real three season budget and timeline though. They really got screwed over having to make each season a stand-alone story.
The prequel books were actually quite good. Yangchen’s has a ton of proletarian focus and plot, which was very surprising considering how Korra was so lib that it was painful
I genuinely think the show writes might have been SO railroaded in the Korra storyline that they desperately wanted to go the opposite direction with the prequels. Like from war profiteer who gets to hang around because he’s rich and funny and aligns himself with the protags, to a book with entire story arcs directed by working class politics. It was very jarring because I definitely see where you’re coming from. I probably wouldn’t have read them at all because of the sour taste Korra’s liberalism left in my mouth had I not been given a copy for free
such as the war profiteer grifter sort of just being allowed to keep doing whatever.
hey that's just realism
It's an incredible show and one I genuinely recommend you watch if you haven't yet
Magic should generally be vibes-based, mysterious, personal, and unpredictable. If it's just a matter of putting the right components together and getting the same results every time, that's not magic, that's just a world with different physical laws.
Recent Warhammer 40K lore is pretty good in this regard. Astropathic interstellar communication used to be like sending an email via your brain, but in more recent lore it's only extremely talented and powerful astropaths can send coherent and detailed messages, depending on their emotional state and the state of the Warp. Low level astropaths can only project basic feelings and simple thoughts so instead of "Armageddon is being invaded by an Ork fleet made up of 150 battleship-sized vessels", a low level Astropath would project "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK ORKS"
I'd argue it depends entirely on what kind of story you're looking for. Ultimately, magic, technology, knowledge etc. are all just plot devices. Mysterious magic can be good, but predictable magic can take the place of technology in a more fantasy-flavored setting.
Kinda have to disagree. Hundreds of pages into the comic they'll still sometimes drop into expositional paragraphs about how the khert works. I've got other problems with the comic but here isn't really the place.
I'm not saying it can't be done well, but I guess all else being equal I just prefer Sci-Fi settings over Fantasy settings so if magic is just taking the place of technology I'd rather it not. A fantasy setting without mysterious magic just feels video-gamey to me; I wouldn't mind it as much if it wasn't so ubiquitous.
Don't get me wrong, it has to be done well
And just because people know how the magic works doesn't mean this character knows
I feel like China Mireille's Bas-Lag setting might suit your tastes better. They have the magic as science thing, but more in the 19th century science way.
i like it when it's very mysterious and weird ("The thief turns and disappears into thin air. how did they do that? fuck knows it's magic")
but also when it's very predictable ("The teleport spell takes precisely 34 seconds to cast, two elderberries tied to your ankles, and a hand gesture that is considered rude by no less than twelve separate cultures")
don't much like the middle ground oddly enoughHave you ever read Brandon Sanderson novels? His hard magic systems are incredible and tied to layers of metaphysics. He really leans into them actually being physical laws
I've read enough excerpts of Brando Sando's work to know his style definitely isn't my thing. And I'm with Zuzak, I much prefer so called "soft" magic systems
Magic should generally be vibes-based, mysterious, personal, and unpredictable
so 100% contrivance? I thought deus ex machina fell out of favor for a reason.
I mean, that's kind of like saying that casinos shouldn't exist in a setting. Having someone winning big at a casino can be a deus ex machina, but there's a lot of stuff you can do with that in a narrative.
it worked for national lampoon I guess but in a dramatic story you can't really use that to solve any problems credibly. the implication of magic being that people would use it to try to get out of trouble and if that's just in-universe gambling i'm :sleepi:
I disagree that it can't be used to solve problems credibly, I think that's just a matter of how it's written. If magic can potentially solve any problem, but accessing it means treking through the enchanted forest to find a reclusive hermit and convincing them to help you, and possibly having to deal with other consequences, that's not a deus ex machina. I think that's a lot more narratively satisfying than like, "Oh Steve died again, time to go to the temple and have them cast Ressurection."
I guess having it be routine is more of my pet peeve than having it be predictable. I like the way it works in classic fairytales, like if you eat the food in the fairy kingdom you'll be stuck there forever. I just don't think magic should be something you can take to a lab and study.
fair enough
I just don’t think magic should be something you can take to a lab and study.
so you want non-human characters i guess. because we will try to put anything and everything into a lab.
That sort of mentality that everything can be studied scientifically is exactly what I don't like about "magic as physical laws." Because science isn't always the right approach to everything. To give an example: poker. It's possible to calculate odds and play a mathematically optimal game of poker, but if someone else realizes that's what you're doing, and also knows how to calculate odds, they'll have a very good read on you. Many top poker players rely more on intuition and gut feelings.
A scientific approach requires a certain set of assumptions, and one of them is that the thing you're studying isn't looking over your shoulder at your notes and actively trying to lead you to the wrong conclusions. That's why it doesn't really work with poker. If you do a study and provide evidence that a certain strategy is more effective, then it will change the meta and more people will use that strategy and be watching for that strategy, so it won't necessarily hold up. Protons don't do that.
So for one example of how magic might not be something people can study in a lab, we can imagine that magic comes from supernatural, intelligent beings, let's say demons. If you try to capture a demon, it can break free of any restraint and teleport away. It doesn't want you to understand how its powers work, so if you try to study it, it will either try to manipulate you and lead you to incorrect conclusions, or it'll just leave. The closest thing you can do to science would be to collect stories from people who have had encounters with demons, but at that point it's basically just "lore."
Or, perhaps a person has magical abilities that are only accessible when they truly believe their lives are in danger, perhaps activated by a mental state. This isn't necessarily impossible to study in a lab, but it's pretty unethical, and getting someone's magic to activate at the same time that you've convinced them you're a threat to their lives might be pretty dangerous.
I'm not going to go into every example of where science can't be applied, but generally I feel like magic should exist in that domain of thing, and to put it in the category where science does apply seems to suggest that science can be applied to everything, which I disagree with.
is psychology not science? you can study patterns of other poker players or even watch tape of them to look for tells etc, there's an analytical method to the thing you're reducing to vibes.
science can be applied to everything, which I disagree
:mao-wtf:
you can study patterns of other poker players or even watch tape of them to look for tells
I wouldn't call that "science," any more than a lion sizing up a herd of antelopes to identify which one it's most likely to catch is practicing science. Say you identify an individual person's tell, are you then going to publish a paper about it, send it out for peer review? If the player in question reads that paper, don't you think they'll try to fix it? And even if not, then when they die, all your work becomes useless, you leave nothing for future scientists to build on, because you were only studying the tells of that individual.
I don't think it's really a controversial claim to say that some questions fall outside the domain of science, I believe the majority of scientists would agree with that.
This is why Assassin 33 A.D. was unironically brilliant, they just said "Since we're in timeline C, everything just wraps up neatly so this isn't a problem"
For my birthday this year I had a movie day where I just picked a list of movies I wanted to watch; good, bad, and ugly; and subjected a group of my friends to them. Some of them weren't bad (Prey, Everything Everywhere, All at Once) others were like this one lol. Assasin 33 A.D. was an old Chapo movie review episode and it made the list. It was actually not bad, ideology aside it was probably on par with marvel slop and like I said there was an actual consideration for the sci-fi shenanigans even if it was so that they could be hand-waved away.
All in all for a time travel movie I gave it a solid 7.5 out of 10
10 out of 10 if we're only considering Christofascist propaganda.
Them making a genuinely reasonable explanation for the random naked guy in one line of the Passion is worth 10/10 on its own
Exactly, me and my friends spent the whole movie trying to pick holes in the time travel stuff and it all checked out they wrapped up every loose end down to the bracelet.
The Chapo review of it made me want to watch it, they legitimately consider it an amazing film because how many movies do you see where Jesus of Nazareth gets fucking domed?
When time travel is introduced into a story that previously didn't have it, it's very easy for it to fuck everything up. But on the other hand Dark is all about time travel and is one of my favorite pieces of sci-fi media, cuz they thought the whole thing out
Ever read Timeline by Michael Crichton? He starts with the alternate universe thing but (spoiler) forgets that by the end of the book.
One of my pet peeves is similar: humans are always right in the middle. They're never second smallest or second smartest or second dumbest. If there are 10 species 4-6 are more one way and 4-6 are more the other way.
I love my star trek, but let's not pretend that just about every species has at least one scene where one of their members is mooneyed in adulation over the fortitude of the human spirit, or their adaptability, or their ferociousness or whatever. It is a very human centric show.
I'm not a big fan of technobabble. It's often just a cheap nonsense answer out of any plot issue the writters have gotten themselves into.
Technobabble is fine as long as they stick to it. Like if a writer comes up with some mcguffin to get themselves out of a hole, that's totally fine as long as it persists as part of the show/narrative reality
As long as it is explained coherently and not just to crowd please and cover up a lack of a third act.
LOST's final seasons were an attempt at crowd pleasing by sorta making all the fan's theory possible, and then bam a Unitarian church is the afterlife. Whatever the fuck that was.
Was a single one of LOST's technobabble(s) explained?
In narratology and comparative mythology, the hero's journey, or the monomyth, is the common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and
comes home changed or transformed.becomes The Good King (TM)Still :sicko-wistful: about there being no :whizzard: or :magicalrealm:
Less of a genre trope and more of a fantasy TV quibble but nothing pisses me off more than when people on medieval or fantasy TV series have clearly anachronistic fashionable haircuts
Make a show about a dude with a tonsure, I dare you
Ancient Egyptian drama show where everyone wears wax headdresses that slowly melt over the course of the episode
When the aliens are humanoid, I get why, it's easier to slap some makeup on an actor but it's not nearly as memorable as weird shit.
..."bubbles"... do they mean matter? Are the Orz something outside the universe, poking in with matter "fingers"?
Yeah that's one of my biggest ones, the humanoid form is something that evolved over tens of millions of years and is very specialized for conditions on earth. Unless the aliens' home planet is nearly identical to earth, it's extremely unlikely that they would have a humanoid form.
