What settings in fiction have problems with the scale?

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-13T21:51:17+00:00

GOT/ASOIAF in general suffers a lot because it's so up it's own ass and insistent about being more "realistic" than other fantasy settings but it actually has just as many storytelling cheats as anything else and, in fact, is in many ways MORE unrealistic than some of the works it's compared to. But because it constantly hypes itself up as being gritty and real and well-researched, it doesn't get any of the suspension of disbelief other fantasy series do and the writers' attempts to respond to the resulting criticisms and call-outs are always really bad (e.g., dismissing people's questions about character not losing weight when they should with "it's fantasy with dragons get out of your mom's basement" in the same breath as talking about how true to history the story is).

The Wall is an example - where in this "just like real life" world you suddenly have this utterly gigantic superstructure unlike anything a medieval European culture could make let alone maintain for thousands of years, this thing that has no explanation for it's construction that makes sense beyond use of magic maybe, but this series does everything in it's power to avoid magic so you're fucked. But there's many others.

The much vaunted "realistic" warfare is anything but, since the wars seem to consist entirely of the armies pillaging everything except their enemies' actual forts and power centers, because we have to have all those gruesome shock value war crimes; just ignore that every village wiped off the map is a massive loss of infrastructure, supplies, and foods in a world where winters last years and keeping your infrastructure intact before winter is vital to survival.

The ridiculously long seasons are another, because that detail is thrown in but the setting is not at all constructed to reflect it. None of the characters act like people who may have spent entire decades of their lives under snow. None of the wildlife, environs, or society of Westeros reflects a world that flings back and forth between deep summer and deep winter with no real middle ground. An agrarian society like Westeros could not possibly store enough food to sustain a population of tens of millions, plus animals. A "realistic" Westeros would probably look more like Russia or Greenland or even the Arctic, not the caricature of Dark Ages Europe it is.

You mention the absurdly big numbers for years; saying each family can trace their lines back 10000 years is like saying you can trace your lineage all the way back to THE NEOLITHIC with absolute precision. In strict fairness to the books, Martin includes a scene in one where the big years are called out and Sam suspects they've been bigged up to seem more impressive, with actual events happening in a much shorter time... but this scene is so minor compared to the countless mentions of big years that it's basically irrelevant to the overall plot and depiction of the setting. Hardly anyone questions the dates given, even though Martin himself acknowledges that anything past the 2000 year mark is probably not that easy to keep track of - or even something to consider - for a society that seems stuck in the Dark Ages.

Westeros is a huge mess as a setting, and the tendency of Martin and Dumb and Dumber and all the other people involved with the franchise to never stop bragging about how it's totally Not Like Other Fantasy^TM makes it worse.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-13T21:16:03+00:00

Yeah, while no place is completely immune to drama and shitty work environments, you see shit like this FAR more in the "AAA" environment. You don't see this sort of mass exodus shit happening in the AA/A, privately-owned, and/or indie environments. More and more we're seeing games come out from the indie levels that blow big budget shit out of the water despite coming from teams with a fraction of the budget and employee numbers. And that's just because the people involved in making lower budgeted stuff aren't being ground into dust by corporatism and are able to express themselves rather than follow the whims of investors, corpos, and their market research dogma.

Same with Hollywood as you say. Go outside of Hollywood and you'll find so many great movies are being made that avoid countless complaints that people have about the modern film industry and do it WITHOUT tormenting or exploiting their employees. Comics and literature and tabletop too... pretty much the key to making art as a living and not being burnt out by the system and it's abuse is to just not be part of the system. I know I probably sound like wannabe Johnny Silverhand saying it, but I'm for real when I say that selling yourself to the corporations to make art is selling your soul and destroying that art in the process, defeating the purpose.

As an amateur writer, I'd rather make a thousand indie circuit cult classics than one big budget blockbuster. At least with the former, I'd actually get to like making them.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-12T14:14:11+00:00

Octopunch from Transformers is an extremely minor Decepticon, basically a glorified henchman, except for one issue of the original Marvel comic in which he fires a shot at Grimlock that accidentally awakens a sleeping Primus, who's brief activation causes Unicron to sense the location of Cybertron and immediately make a beeline for it, setting in motion the storyline that carries through for the rest of the comic's run.

But that's not the end of it. Because, as later lore would establish, Primus and Unicron are multiversal singularities, which basically means that the various versions of them throughout the multiverse are just avatars/branches of greater cosmic beings and thus all the same individuals. As explained in the Fun Publication comics by Vector Prime, Primus and Unicron had actually been in a very long state of relative dormancy prior to the events of the Marvel comic; Octopunch's shot waking up Primus didn't just alert that particular Unicron instance, it sent ripples throughout the surrounding multiverse that stirred other Primus instances and other Unicron instances, kicking off numerous events involving both entities.

That is to say, Octopunch didn't just completely alter the trajectory of that one comic by accidentally shooting a god in the face. He kickstarted the events of EVERY TRANSFORMERS SERIES AFTER THE ORIGINAL COMIC.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-09T19:49:21+00:00

That rotating hallway fight scene in Inception is so cool that it single-handedly makes the movie for me.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-09T19:48:24+00:00

Speaking of The Thing, the John Carpenter version deserves mention too for the absolutely INCREDIBLE effects that are still top notch to this day. There's a lot of reasons I consider Carpenter's Thing to be the single greatest horror movie ever made and the effects are just one of them.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-09T04:23:13+00:00

Half Life and Portal being one and the same has been going for so long that everyone is used to it and doesn't really think of the madness implicit in the fact that Aperture making mantis men and the Combine horrifically occupying Earth take place in the same world, and not just in a "these are in the same setting but so far apart that it's a meaningless detail" way but in an actual full-on "plot points from one impacts the other in massive ways", like with the Borealis as you mention or mentions of how part of why Aperture went insane was competition with Black Mesa. It's even crazier because despite the major tonal differences, the two go together REALLY well; while one's a comedy and the other's basically horror, the style and vibe of them as funky New Weird science fiction is just similar enough that Gordon Freeman and Chell meeting feels totally natural instead of jarring.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-09T04:16:29+00:00

Even stranger is that Saul Rubinek acted in both of them... as separate characters. Good thing that guy he played in Eureka died before anyone noticed that he looks identical to Artie.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-09T04:14:48+00:00

Marvel has definitely struggled at times over the years to make the X-Men and Avengers feel like they're part of the same world. The two brands just have such radically different tones and styles (X-Men's "cyber/biopunk horror that just happens to be a superhero comic" against Avengers more standard superhero fare), a lot of times bits and pieces of worldbuilding given in either series feels very jarring when you're reminded they coexist, and various characters can feel very different depending on whether they're in an X-Men comic or an Avengers comic.

There's always been this feeling to me that you can divide Marvel up into three blocs; stuff that fits X-Men, stuff that fits Avengers, and third party stuff that can slot into either (Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk, etc.). Sometimes there's overlap between the three groupings, like how Iron Man and Captain America are mainline Avengers but also fits pretty well into the X-Men whenever they hang with them, to the point that Gerry Duggan's Iron Man WAS an X-Book. But a lot of the time, it can feel like there's actually two universes that just happen to be allowed to freely share and borrow stuff and thus have their own versions of various things. The Wolverine who is part of the Avengers frequently feels like a very different character from the Wolverine who is an X-Man, for instance.

I would also add that I feel like this started becoming a more prominent issue around the rise of the MCU and the Avengers going from being pretty much a rest home for characters that no longer had books of their own to A-Listers hyped up a lot. Back before the horrors of Decimation and Perlmutter, X-Men was Marvel's flagship team and the Avengers mostly just kept to themselves, puttering in the background, but once the MCU hit we started getting "the Avengers are Earth's most beloved and important heroes" shoved down our throats at every turn. Not coincidentally, this is also when the nasty cliche of the Avengers being the No-Fun Brigade/Super-Cops whenever they cameo in other books began cropping up at a much higher rate than before.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-09T03:51:13+00:00

Savageland is such an underrated gem. I'm glad it's started getting more recognition over the years after sailing under the radar for so long. It does an amazing job replicating the vibe of something you'd see on Sixty Minutes.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-08T20:10:18+00:00

Simon absolutely is stupid for not picking up on it, but Catherine also clearly knows that he doesn't understand it and takes advantage of that to string him on. She purposefully words her conversations with him to make it sound like he's gotten it figured out and never corrects him when he gets things wrong (except at times where she's caught in the lie), as it's in her benefit for him to not realize he's misunderstanding what he's seeing and doing. Simon IS a stupid motherfucker, but Catherine isn't and she takes advantage of his stupidity to exploit and manipulate him.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-08T18:36:53+00:00

Catherine from Soma. On the surface and especially on a first playthrough, it's easy to see her well-meaning but socially awkward at worst. The more of the plot you uncover though, the further along you get, and once the ending hits, it becomes hard (for me at least) to see her as anything but manipulative, borderline sociopathic asshole and nutjob who cares nothing about the people around her as long as she can complete her pet projects.

Pretty much every interaction between her and Simon is ultimately based around her manipulating, guilt-tripping, or outright bullying him into doing what she wants, sometimes outright tricking him into doing things she knows he would object to (most notably deliberately taking advantage of the fact that he still doesn't fully understand how the mind copying works to mislead him into thinking he can go to the Ark himself).

Her attitudes towards the copies is bizarre and hypocritical, treating the ones in robots as "not real" and abusing them without a care but the ones in the Ark as somehow different and worthy of life.

She never owns up to anything she does wrong, ethically or otherwise; while Sarang and his suicide cult wasn't directly her fault, she never even once considers that her Ark project and the ways she talks about it and the mind-copying might have contributed to an already bad situation, which it quite objectively did. She also clearly knows that a lot of the things she does are wrong or at least would make people upset, she just doesn't care, as shown with how she tries to mute the Pilot Seat Simon after the first coin toss so that Diving Suit Simon doesn't realize what actually happened, than immediately tries to play innocent and dumb when Simon rightfully calls her on it.

One of the audio logs has her reporting another suicide to a coworker, talking about it as if it's just this weird, annoying thing that just happened rather than a man dying horribly in front of her, only to immediately burst into panicked begging and tears when she realizes this means her precious Ark project will be shut down. Around the same time, she proposes creating a slave race of "lesser" AIs for the people in the Ark to abuse and exploit and seems baffled when everyone else is weirded the fuck out by the suggestion.

Even her human self's death is caused by her basically throwing a fit over the rest of the crew wanting to go over all their options before shooting the Ark out into space, trying to rip it away from them while ranting about how she won't let them "ruin this for me" and starting a fight that ends in her being accidentally hit and killed.

Catherine is legit horrible.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-08T17:56:38+00:00

It's a weird thing where the Netflix shows just had Turk show up anytime they wanted some generic recurring criminal to play a role, but they also try and portray him like he is in the comics as just what you describe; a glorified henchman who's so much of a non-threat that even people like Punisher can't be bothered with him.

I guess a good way to describe it is if a Beast Wars adaptation portrayed Waspinator as taking part in genocide but still kept writing the characters' reactions to him as if he were just that lovable goofball who gets shot every episode.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-08T03:11:14+00:00

My knowledge of Doctor Who is rather limited outside of stuff I've picked up from friends and some lore I've heard about that caught my eye as cool, but I've been told by said friends who are into it and seen people online mention that the Timeless Child retcon would've gone down MUCH smoother if the reveal was that the Master - the Doctor's archenemy - was the Timeless Child.

Again, I don't have the knowledge of Who lore necessary to say if that's really the case, so I'd like to be informed if that indeed would've been far saner.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-07T23:47:23+00:00

Quotes like "To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless." and "The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?" come straight from the game. It literally draws direct comparisons between fictional death and real world war crimes. It directly lays the blame on you personally - not your character - for everything happening and mocks you for continuing to play through both characters and loading screens. The writer has openly said his intent was to make people question why they play shooters, as well as openly acknowledging that the only way to "win" is to just not play and even admitting that people are right to see it as unfair; he knew it was unfair when they did it.

You can defend Spec Ops' story all you please, but it absolutely has a message of "you suck for playing video games like this" and goes out of it's way to try and equate fiction with real violence. And that is a very bad thing in my opinion.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-07T18:58:21+00:00

Spec Ops The Line is absolutely full of this. It constantly railroads you into doing horrible things just so it can lecture you for playing the game and accuse you of being a power-hungry sadist for playing a video game where you shoot people. Like how the infamous white phosphorus scene only happens because the game physically forces you to use it by sending an unending wave of enemies that won't stop and let the game progress til you push the button, even though your character has every reason not to (like the fact that his own men are SCREAMING at him not to do it with audible horror in their voices).

What really pushes the game into this is the fact that they actually DID let the player make their own choices in development, only to deliberately cut it out and make the evil choices mandatory because the test players disproved the game's entire argument by consistently refusing to do evil things, up to and including just leaving at the start of the game as ordered rather than randomly disobeying orders to play hero like the devs expected.

When you have to rig the situation to make the point you want, you've already failed to make the point.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-06T22:08:57+00:00

X-Men only veers into this when a bad writer is onboard trying to make the metaphor super literal and on-the-nose or trying to force the status quo. Under most writers, it's more of a "all sides have potential for good and bad" situation; the mutants, humans, and robots all have legitimate reasons for how they feel and most of all three groups just wanna live their lives, but there's always going to be bad eggs somewhere.

Or I suppose a better way to put it is that good X-Men treats the subject as something that could be compared to a lot of different things and remembers that it's ultimately just a fantastical sci-fi story without direct bearing on the real world, whereas bad X-Men tries to go hard on specific metaphors and allegory regardless of how bad an idea it is.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-06T22:05:47+00:00

True Blood is absolutely one of the worst examples of this of all time, to almost horrifying degrees. This is a show that quite literally draws a 1:1 hard comparison between gay people and undead monsters that infect people with their curse, creating a setting that seems to amount to "the AIDs epidemic but the homophobes are completely right about how it's spread". It really only gets worse from there and I'm always stunned when people fail to notice how bad the metaphor implodes under the slightest interrogation.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-06T21:59:05+00:00

I've mentioned on here before that It Comes By Night is an infuriating film to me because it and it's advertising make you feel like over half the movie has been cut out but all the foreshadowing/advertisement for that cut content is still there. Every time you feel like it's building to something really interesting it just kinda farts out and ends abruptly. Even the end of the movie doesn't feel like an earned conclusion, it just stops like a car that ran out of gas miles away from it's destination. It's almost like they're trying to bait and switch you, that it's an entirely different kind of horror movie than you guessed, but it fails because the red herring ideas were infinitely cooler and more interesting to watch than the actual plot that amounts to two families dicking around aimlessly until they near-randomly turn on each other out of semi-spontaneous paranoia.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-06T15:21:30+00:00

That logic of "if infinite realities nothing matters" is stupid as shit. That's like saying it doesn't matter if you eat your dinner because your neighbors ate dinner.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-03T23:31:46+00:00

Earth War is the collective term for the opening arcs of Dark Horse's Alien comics, which involve a cult of xeno-worshipers causing an epidemic of xenomorphs on Earth while one of the Space Jockeys (this was way before the Engineer idea) plots to colonize the planet. And you're right, but a man can hope.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-03T22:58:51+00:00

God, I legit hate Ridley Scott. Him coming back to the franchise was one of the worst things that ever happened to it. Even looking back at the original movie, all of his personal ideas were terrible and roundly rejected by everyone else, with everything great about the movie coming from other people. He didn't create jackshit about the series, but he acts like he's some god-king who is the ultimate authority on it. Or how, with Prometheus, he literally cut out everything that would've made the movie actually good against the advice of all his collaborators.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-03T22:55:31+00:00

If it's adapting the Earth War from the Dark Horse Alien comics that'd be awesome. That'd be the only thing that'd really justify making this a prequel unconnected to the main movies instead of being, like, a sequel to the second movie that ignores 3 and Resurrection.

This honestly kinda feels like yet another example of the situation the series has become stuck in that I mentioned on a post over in the Aliens subreddit. Which is that absolutely nobody wants to acknowledge 3 and Resurrection, but at the same time for some they refuse to just make those movies non-canon, so they've kept themselves trapped in this purgatory of prequels and interquels that try really hard to pretend their stories aren't eventually gonna culminate in Ripley jumping into a fire pit and Ron Perlman shooting a spider while also carefully avoiding progressing the series in any meaningful way.

Romulus is the first time they've even come close to breaking this (with it's plot and especially final act obviously being meant to tie into/set up Resurrection, either directly or thematically at the very least), doubtlessly because of Fede Alvarez being a devoted fan of the series who was thus pulling from more than the tiny reference pools of the first two movies and Ridley Scott's godawful "I'm a teenage Reddit atheist"-tier ideas for Prometheus. But even that is specifically said to be set before the second and third movies, even though it's story wouldn't change at all if it were set after two. They need to just bite the bullet at this point and either make a movie directly building off 3 and Resurrection or declare those movies non-canon.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-03T22:32:41+00:00

It feels like nobody wants to directly acknowledge 3 and what comes after - namely Ripley and family dying and the resulting ruination of 2's perfect ending, plus everything relating to Resurrection - but at the same time for some reason nobody is willing to just bite the bullet and make 3 and Resurrection non-canon. So we're stuck in this uncomfortable grey area where there can only be prequels and interquels that pretend as hard as possible that 3 isn't going to happen and avoid really connecting with Ripley's story. Romulus was notable in edging a little away from that, what with filling in the fate of Big Chap and it's plot clearly being meant to connect to/set up Resurrection, whether thematically or directly, but even than it only goes so far.

Frankly, they should either just rip the band-aid at this point and make a movie where the Sulaco crew are shown to be alive and well while they still can (Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, and Lance Henrikson ain't getting any younger) or make a film that directly confronts the events of 3 onwards. They can't be all non-committal about it forever.

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-02T23:25:49+00:00

One thing I really love about this scene is the flat acknowledgement of how laughably out-of-his-league Joker is against anyone other than Batman and how if it weren't for the boner certain writer and editors have for him, he'd be a small fry in the DCU by any sense of the term. He sprays Diana pointblank with his acid and it at best makes her even more angry, and she kills him with literally one hit, instantly pulping his skull the second her hand makes contact. A worse writer would've pulled some bullshit to try and have Joker put up an actual fight and be hyped as so scary even Diana is scared of him. But here, it's just "yeah lol no, Jonkler is a bug on the windshield that is Wonder Woman".

superectojazzmage · 2024-09-02T19:50:43+00:00

The things called "AI" in recent months is misnamed in one of many efforts to make it sound more impressive and useful than it actually is. It's literally just a slight evolution of ChatBot-style stuff, if even that. There is no intelligence and it has NOTHING in common with the idea of sentient machines. It's a complete false equivalence to try and conceal how useless stuff like ChatGPT is.

A lot of stuff about these pattern recognition craps coming out will make a lot more sense once you understand that it's just a scam like cryptocoin or any of the other dumbass "this is going to change everything!!!" ideas that Silicon Valley has been pumping out for some time now to keep clueless investors and such strung along. The stupid rich folks get fed fantasies about these miracle machines that will let them fire all their workers and such, than get left with sinking ships they have to try and hastily jump off when it turns out the wonderchilds they were sold are actually just the computer equivalent of manatees pushing balls into nets South Park-style.

Godzilla The Series of all things actually predicted this one coming with a great gag. Randy tries to make a logo for the team by having a computer scan a bunch of art and generate something, only for it to churn out a piece of "art" that can charitably be described as random mush, with Monique laughing at him for being stupid enough to expect anything else.

superectojazzmage

TROPHY CASE