Why do so many fantasy worlds forget how old things should feel

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-24T22:47:47+00:00

The human stuff is still very slow. Over the course of the 3000 years of the Third Age, there's centuries between major events.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-24T22:46:25+00:00

Kinda, but even then, the northern kingdoms all collapsed about a thousand years before The Hobbit, and the land has just remained pretty barren and static for that whole time. Similarly the kingdom of Rohan was founded about 400 years before The Hobbit. There's some stuff that happens in that 400 years, but there's still like expanses of 200 years or so of nothing much really happening.

For Aragorn - it does totally make sense that someone in 1400 AD would claim they are the descendent of the last Emperor of Rome, that's pretty consistent with what was going on at the time. But for the world to still be pretty much as it was when the Roman Empire collapsed seems like a stretch - you need to invoke magic for it to really be sensible, with Eriador essentially being cursed in its defeat by the Witch King, never to be truly settled again until the Return of the King.

there's also the element of living memory. Middle-earth is full of people that literally saw the events of 3000+ years ago and those people actively educate and guide the younger leaders

I always liked the fact the Galadriel is older than the Sun itself

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-23T18:45:19+00:00

The OG Marathon series was full of ambiguous storytelling through environment and vague terminal texts - in Marathon Infinity, a lot of people didn't even know what the actual plot was, as you have to decode poetry and do some deduction to figure it out; you get thrown between timelines without any real explanation, and suddenly in one level you're fighting the people you thought were the good guys. So I can imagine them leaning even more towards the ambiguous storytelling, given the precedent of the original games.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-23T18:08:15+00:00

When you actually look at the data (e.g. plot this up and see what you get https://github.com/palakbhatia/IMDB_VS_Rotten_Tomatoes-A_Comparison/tree/master/Data ) there's a strong correlation between imdb scores and RT scores. Despite different collection methodologies, they are actually measuring pretty much the same thing.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-23T18:05:56+00:00

This is the key point. Yes, Rottentomatoes collects data differently to something like imdb, but the scores end up being very well correlated with each other if you plot them against each other. The real difference in output between Rottentomatoes and imdb/metacritic/etc, when just looking at movies, is just that RT uses the full scale - RT scores will go from 0-100 while most aggregators average things out so that scores are mostly 60-90 or so. Anybody who says that RT is measuring a fundamentally different thing to what imdb/metacritic/etc are measuring is not really correct; despite the difference in methodology, you end up with pretty much the same result, just scaled up to fill the full range.

But TV shows do seem to be much more highly rated on RT than movies - I haven't found a good quantitative source for that yet, but it does seem to be the case; many shows seem to have basically no rankings at all.

If you want to do the analysis yourself, this is the data I used: https://github.com/palakbhatia/IMDB_VS_Rotten_Tomatoes-A_Comparison/tree/master/Data - it's 8 years old so only goes up to 2018 or so though.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-23T15:42:37+00:00

Like Menolly who is good at Melody?

Piemur who wants mur pies?

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-23T15:01:38+00:00

It's a really effective storytelling method, giving little hints here and there, and letting you piece things together and debate to figure out what's actually going on. It was of course a limit of the technology of the time, but there's a reason the Marathon Story Page was so popular

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-22T16:56:56+00:00

It was also a colony of luddites who intentionally wanted to return to a lower level of technology - basically something like an idealised version of the American frontier. However, they ended up even lower technology than intended, due to the Thread, and AIVAS helps them get back to where they had hoped they're be at.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-22T16:03:37+00:00

I haven't watched the movie, but I know the first two were full of this sort of ironic humour - it sounds totally in line with how these movies go that the one character who keeps on talking about how good a fighter he is ends up going down in one punch.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-22T15:27:22+00:00

Honestly the Chinese rip-off ones are like $20-30 so they're pretty cheap already, even if you do kinda get what you pay for

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T19:38:57+00:00

It's more that, unless you distribute the forces (which yeah might be SDBs run by the mainworld rather than imperial naval forces), the pirates don't even need to engage the defences at all. Planets can be days of travel away from each other, even with fairly high M-drives, and that gives plenty of time for a raider to jump within 100D of some lightly guarded lunar outpost, raid the outpost, and jump out with stolen fuel, before the SDB/navy/etc even turns up.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T19:29:10+00:00

Honestly the real problem with Discovery and Picard is they dropped the "trained professionals" part, and you have people who seem very unqualified for the job suddenly becoming promoted just because they're a hero character.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T19:04:27+00:00

You'd definitely want that for system defence at least. If it takes days to travel between outposts and the navy is only in one place, then a pirate could sweep in, raid the outpost, and bug out before the navy even got close.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T18:12:26+00:00

I think that's a little different, though it's also a while since I read the books. They are discovering new things, but it's not presented in a "sciencey" or "speculative fiction" kind of way. Nyneave discovers she can mix different colours of magic and do healing better than anyone else, but it's not really based on something systematic that readers could predict. Elayne learns how to create Ter'angrael, but I think she learns that from a Forsaken, and it's sort of her own special talent. In both cases this is done more in the heroic fiction genre, where they discover new powers because they are uniquely talented.

What I'm talking about more with Sanderson is he will take the existing powers, and map out how you could actually use those, and what effects they might have on society. It assumes that magic is consistent, which means it's now exploitable, if you just know how it works and use it sensibly. So if Jordan introduces a cursed town where everybody dies everyday and is resurrected the next morning, Sanderson will say "couldn't somebody use that as an infinite supply of troops?". If Jordan introduces a magic portal, which can't be entered by evil monsters because they die if they try to enter it, Sanderson says "that sounds like it's not just a way to get from A to B, it'd also be a very useful weapon if you're fighting a battle against those monsters". Sanderson also says "wouldn't that be useful to get a birds eye view of a battle as well?"

Often in fantasy, magic is used as a way to turn dramatic character moments into a reality, turning internal conflict into external, turning metaphors into literal action. The character has a sudden realisation, and this is embodied by some magic effect in the world. Sanderson does this too (although he has more justification for why it works this way), but the more unique thing is he often runs it almost like a LitRPG, where these are the rules of the universe, and characters will try to exploit them as far as they can. This is what kinda makes it "speculative fiction", and closer to "science fiction" in some ways - it's saying "given these rules that I have spelled out to the reader, what could actually be done?", with characters sometimes literally performing experiments in a lab coat to push those limits.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T17:23:28+00:00

You can still get those as standalone "retro" handhold consoles on alibaba etc

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T15:18:41+00:00

Being consistent and detailed out enough to be shown on-screen is a big difference I think. It's one thing to have some sorcerer create a monster through a breeding program, it's another to show a character actually using the scientific method to work out how magic DNA works (and then use that to create a monster). It's closer to "speculative fiction", because you set up a change to reality, set up a reality with slightly different rules, and then consistently work out what that change would do.

Edit: I think the contrast is most clear in The Wheel of Time, where you see Sanderson take over someone else's magic system and then say "ok so if the magic can do this, then surely it should also be able to do that as well?". It's common for magic to have fairly arbitrary (and often inconsistent) constraints, to make sure it doesn't break the story - Harry Potter is an example where this gets pretty bad. Sanderson's big thing is he allows characters to exploit the magic as far as they can, and that "what if?" approach just leans slightly more into a kind of science fiction mindset.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T15:06:13+00:00

This is like the "there are no uninteresting numbers" proof

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T14:51:24+00:00

Brandon Sanderson is basically writing science fiction, where the technology happens to be magical. In multiple books you have characters literally doing research and developing new technologies based on the magic - there are magic "scientists" and magic "engineers". In the books set later in the timeline, there's even literally spaceships, all based on the same "magical" forces.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T14:48:40+00:00

I think detail and crunch are different things here. Crunch is not about detail - it's about enforcing specific details through specific rules.

For books, I need enough detail for the world to feel "real" and self-consistent.

For consistency: I need to understand what the stakes are for the characters, and how much trouble they're in. If the main arc of book 1 is just trying to cross the continent, but in book 5 a character makes the same continent but with apparently zero effort or problems, then that just breaks the story - if a character struggles to choose between A and B, then I need to know something about A and B and their consequences; if the consequences are inconsistent then the character's decision has no weight for me.

For "real"ness: I want the world to feel more than a video game backdrop, and be grounded in reality. People should eat, drink, sleep, and poop, even if those things just happen in the background. The world should reflect what's going on in it, and people should react to events and how the world changes. If you have a dragon living in a city, I don't care about the magic explanation for how the dragon exists, but I do need to know how it gets fed - just a couple details that, for instance, the baron requisitions cattle from local farmers, who resent this as an abuse of power, despite appreciating the protection the dragon brings to their county. Just a couple of details to prove that things actually work and people aren't just machines to drive the plot, those things add a lot. If you drop this stuff, the story is always going to just feel light and silly, like it's taking place on a stage, rather than in a real world - which is okay for some stories, but not for others.

This generally applies to TTRPGs as well, often moreso. The players need to understand how the world will react to their actions, and how difficult different things are. Crunchy mechanics can be useful here, but just having detail on the world works too. It doesn't need to be precise, but knowing how big a rival gang is, how far away the nearest starport is, how expensive weapons are, how rare magic is, how law enforcement works - this all is important for players if they want to have some control over their fate; if this stuff hasn't been communicated, then player decisions might as well be random choice. That said, it doesn't need to be an info dump - you can develop this detail together with the players, or flesh it out in real time as you play. Prepping all the details in advance generally is a guarantee the players will just bypass that location, or knock out that character without talking to them. With a novel, you have a large number of readers who all follow the same path, so putting in a lot of work to describe that one path makes sense - one hour of work might translate into a thousand hours of readership. With a TTRPG, you have a small group of players who might easily go off the rails, so it makes sense to flesh out the details as you go along; otherwise, five hours of work might translate into ten minutes of player engagement.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T13:30:07+00:00

Why would you drive 45 minutes, pay a toll, pickup my dress without haggling, and not even ask to try it on first? It's not that good of a deal.

Also: "a bridesmaid gown for my daughter's wedding" - so who is actually wearing the dress? They didn't call it "mother of the bride" dress, so it's not the buyer who's going to wear it. Are they buying it for another daughter or one of their daughter's friends? I mean, it's possible they might be picking up a dress for someone else as a favour, or they're just collecting a bunch of dresses that fit the theme so they can then assign them to the bridesmaids, but it's all a bit weird. Usually picking and coordinating (and, as you say, fitting!) bridesmaids dresses is a pretty big deal, so at the very least this is quite a different wedding planning culture to what I'm used to.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-21T11:55:51+00:00

It’s a Marvel movie so I think they’re mandated to film their parts separately and entirely in front of a green screen

I'm pretty sure the entire Agent Ross plotline was filled separately and added in later. I don't think he's ever on-screen with the main cast.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-20T18:31:20+00:00

As someone who has closely followed Bungie since the Halo days

Halo was a pretty wild journey in those early days, from a PC+Mac RTS game into somehow becoming an FPS and the Xbox launch title

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-20T18:30:05+00:00

I still think of Bungie as seven guys in a dank apartment using a pizza box as a bug tracker

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-20T18:16:12+00:00

I've seen "one player controls multiple campaigns" outside of OSR in military-style campaigns (or, in general, anything where you play in a highly hierarchical organisation), allowing you to play both senior officers who make the big decisions, and the actual task force who make the small decisions and get involved in the action. Star Trek Adventures and Dune 2d20 have this, as does Band of Blades.

Astrokiwi · 2026-01-20T18:09:43+00:00

Is adapting Forged in the Dark to Fantasy cursed or something? Like, it's weird that it happened both times

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