#QuestionOfTheDay What's something (a trope, plot point, character type, twist, technology, magic, decision, conceit of the genre/world, whatever) in fiction that you just can't buy.

🤖Robot Enby Xero🤖

@ami_angelwings easy for me: the trope of "the clone must die" and variations thereof.

I get so sick of the noble sacrifice to save the original or treating clones with identical memories (up to that point) as monsters or so on and so forth. (This is for clones or doppelgangers that aren't written as deliberately evil, which is a different can of worms entirely.)

And a further subtrope where the clone lives, on or off screen (usually off in older shows to save money on compositing) but they keep them as a bottle episode death just in case they need them for that. Older example: Thomas Riker brought back to be a Maquis agent for one episode. Recent example. Killing off Frost on The Flash after her coexisting perfectly with Caitlyn for like three seasons.

Anyway

Ami Angelwings

@Sobex yeah there's no consent, I've seen justifications of it, I know why Yuri fans like it, but to me it's just the aro/ace version of "you can turn a lesbian straight by forcing physical contact on them and they realize they like it", I know people will say "she wasn't aro/ace to begin with, she was just finding herself, she just didn't meet the right person, etc" I know they have a discussion in the manga with an ace character, but i still see it as "see sometimes lack of consent and the magical kiss is needed to force you to realize you actually love somebody/your sexuality is wrong"

Ami Angelwings

@bikubi I also wonder how they breathe

Rosy

@ami_angelwings this reminds me of something I saw on a forum years ago when the Twilight books were coming out and there was lots on controversy about them... I never read them but I guess in one book Edward the vampire impregnates Bella even though it was established that vampires like himself don't have heartbeats. this led to people on the forum questioning how he was able to, er... consumate their marriage, in the first place haha.

(this is a book series where corpses sparkle so they were probably overthinking it...)

kubi

@ami_angelwings yess! See also, time freezing. Atoms. I need to breathe

Ami Angelwings

@xerozohar I liked that they kept Thomas Riker, that was fresh to me, but I hated that they didn't do anything with him but bring him back for one ratings baiting early season DS9 episode (they even advertised it as Riker guest stars in DS9) and then have him just be thrown in a Cardassian gulag somewhere forever I guess

Nazo

@chertridge @ami_angelwings I've seen maybe two things ever that actually implemented a soundless space. I wish more did. As you say, sound won't travel through space itself. I suppose you could hear, say, an explosion when matter such as released air and debris actually physically reached you, but that's about it. It sort of is too bad not many things have been willing to be brave enough to implement this particular bit of realism.

At least one famous movie got away with it though!

Morning Song

@ami_angelwings "If you die in the Matrix you die in real life"

It's petty but it means that almost nobody is willing to spend a couple hours thinking of a different way to create stakes in a scenario involving a holodeck/vr/whatever. And so every holodeck/vr/whatever story ends up basically exactly the same.

But there ARE ways. Hell, fucking Star Trek Voyager in one of its worst slumps figured out a way.

Karel P Kerezman

@xerozohar @ami_angelwings Co.

Freaking.

SIGNED.

Chertridge

@nazokiyoubinbou @ami_angelwings I've see (not heard) it a time or two but can't remember what shows/movies

Nazo

@bikubi @ami_angelwings Even if it actually removes atoms so it ends up being roughly the same, a living organism is balanced to be the size range it's supposed to be. Everything would go wildly out of control and hearts would explode or whatever, lol.

Nazo

@chertridge @ami_angelwings 2001: A Space Odyssey would be the most famous one. It plays music loudly and the stuff going on in space is dead silent.

Ami Angelwings

@bikubi also when people phase out of normal physical existence, how they breathe, or even move, if gravity affects them, etc

Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@ami_angelwings Time travel models that don't at least try to answer the question of "why not go back in time again and fix your previous time travel fuckup?" Whenever I replay Chrono Trigger, I just want to go back to an earlier point in one of the eras and un-do something.

There's so many ways of addressing that, like Link Click handles it by having the concept of an "anchor," or there's other stories that just run with "yep, you can!" It's always weird when that question is left hanging.

Nazo

@ami_angelwings @bikubi So much this...

If you can walk through walls, air atoms are just going to pass right through your lungs.

But, here's the thing...

If you walk through walls......

The floor also doesn't exist for you!!!

So if you're phased out, you're going to die in the heat of the planetary core or the cold of space or whatever whenever you phase back in. Or if you don't you'll just suffocate.

Ami Angelwings

@nazokiyoubinbou @bikubi I like the next generation episode "The Next Phase" because it's a great character episode about Geordi and Ro, but nothing about it made any sense to me, even as a child, I was like how do they breathe! why aren't they falling through the floor? shouldn't they just phase through everything and be left behind by the Enterprise as it flies around?

Nazo

@MorningSong @ami_angelwings The Holodeck at least made sense. It had safety mechanisms to keep what happened from actually killing a person. But if the safeties go off, then it would affect you via normal physics or whatever.

But the other things... Yeah, they just have to tack something on. Like for dying in VR to make sense the system itself has to shock your heart into stopping or something on purpose. That's not even a mechanism that makes sense... For the Matrix to kill a person it has to actually kill their body separately on principle... (That one bothered me especially because they were supposed to be using it as a system of supposedly getting power from people in the system. By letting people die the Matrix was decreasing power capabilities...)

estelle

@bikubi @ami_angelwings i was under the impression that they tried doing this by replacing electrons with muons to do fusion at really low temperatures but the muons decay too quickly (? there was some limiting factor) so as far as anyone can tell it's guaranteed never to produce energy

but it's still concerning that if you shrank too much you might fuse at room temperature

kubi

@estelle @ami_angelwings wait, who? whose muons?
but yes, sounds plausible

Nazo

@ami_angelwings @bikubi Same!

I guess I didn't think about the air (although in retrospect that should have been obvious,) but I definitely realized that nothing would hold them in place. They'd either fall through or, as you say, just not get pulled along as it moves.

I mean it isn't just selective like, say, the bottoms of their feet still being there or the bottoms of their feet would catch when they tried to go through walls.

Wandering Adventure Party

#QuestionOfTheDay What's something (a trope, plot point, character type, twist, technology, magic, decision, conceit of the genre/world, whatever) in fiction that you just can't buy.