#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.
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#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.
i.e. you get that it's fiction, & that it's a thing that happens, or that in the fictional world it's accepted, justified, or explained, or fans love it, etc. It's not that you don't understand it, it's just that you don't buy it, it doesn't work for you, you just can't accept it or take it seriously, etc...
This is a judgement free zone (at least from my end) so if you're like "when space magic shows up I can't take it seriously" or "ppl being able to fly makes no sense to me" etc that's totally fine.
#fiction #Television #TV #manga #anime #film #movies #books #CCGs #ttrpg #videogames #comics #comicbooks
@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.
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@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

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@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!
@nazokiyoubinbou @ami_angelwings I've see (not heard) it a time or two but can't remember what shows/movies
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@ami_angelwings shrinking. Can not stop thinking about atoms, and how dense shrunk people would be
@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.
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@nazokiyoubinbou @ami_angelwings I've see (not heard) it a time or two but can't remember what shows/movies
@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.
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@ami_angelwings yess! See also, time freezing. Atoms. I need to breathe
@bikubi also when people phase out of normal physical existence, how they breathe, or even move, if gravity affects them, etc
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#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.
i.e. you get that it's fiction, & that it's a thing that happens, or that in the fictional world it's accepted, justified, or explained, or fans love it, etc. It's not that you don't understand it, it's just that you don't buy it, it doesn't work for you, you just can't accept it or take it seriously, etc...
This is a judgement free zone (at least from my end) so if you're like "when space magic shows up I can't take it seriously" or "ppl being able to fly makes no sense to me" etc that's totally fine.
#fiction #Television #TV #manga #anime #film #movies #books #CCGs #ttrpg #videogames #comics #comicbooks
@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.
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@bikubi also when people phase out of normal physical existence, how they breathe, or even move, if gravity affects them, etc
@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.
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@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.
@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?
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@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.
@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...)
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@ami_angelwings shrinking. Can not stop thinking about atoms, and how dense shrunk people would be
@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
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@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
@estelle @ami_angelwings wait, who? whose muons?
but yes, sounds plausible
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@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?
@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.
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@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...)
@nazokiyoubinbou @MorningSong when I first saw the matrix and they said if you die in the matrix you die in real life I was like that doesn't make sense, and I really really thought the ending would be that Neo realizes it doesn't make sense and that's how he survives death by not believing in it, mind you I also thought he would basically just live as a consciousness in the Matrix without need for a body at the end
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#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.
i.e. you get that it's fiction, & that it's a thing that happens, or that in the fictional world it's accepted, justified, or explained, or fans love it, etc. It's not that you don't understand it, it's just that you don't buy it, it doesn't work for you, you just can't accept it or take it seriously, etc...
This is a judgement free zone (at least from my end) so if you're like "when space magic shows up I can't take it seriously" or "ppl being able to fly makes no sense to me" etc that's totally fine.
#fiction #Television #TV #manga #anime #film #movies #books #CCGs #ttrpg #videogames #comics #comicbooks
@ami_angelwings
Women looking at their newborn squeeling
"He's beautiful!"Having been through the experience I can say the tiny person is very loveable, but you are tired, sore, and the baby is blueish and covered in slime. Beautiful is _not_ the word.
Also, that the mom usually dies minutes after saying that line makes it even worse.
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@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...)
@nazokiyoubinbou @ami_angelwings Yeah, there's a reasonable watsonian explanation for holodeck malfunctions, but a well-reasoned plot isn't a *good* plot, and it means that with like... three exceptions i can think of over the entire 90s trek era, every holodeck malfunction episode is basically exactly the same.
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@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?
@ami_angelwings @nazokiyoubinbou it's like the sheer amount of obvious surface impossibilities has my brain idle at like 30%... leaves only 35% for each ro and geordie
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@estelle @ami_angelwings wait, who? whose muons?
but yes, sounds plausible
@bikubi @ami_angelwings negative charge like electron but beeg (so it sits closer to the nucleus)
but also extremely prone to decay, so...
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@nazokiyoubinbou @MorningSong when I first saw the matrix and they said if you die in the matrix you die in real life I was like that doesn't make sense, and I really really thought the ending would be that Neo realizes it doesn't make sense and that's how he survives death by not believing in it, mind you I also thought he would basically just live as a consciousness in the Matrix without need for a body at the end
@ami_angelwings @MorningSong Honestly the whole thing is crazy silly. It would make a lot more sense just to setup chemical pools or something to do the same stuff human bodies do if it came to that, but putting that aside, why do a whole big fake world? Just trap people's minds in some looping trippy thing so they never really know what's going on and they would never even learn enough from birth to even think "is reality even real?"
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@nazokiyoubinbou @ami_angelwings Yeah, there's a reasonable watsonian explanation for holodeck malfunctions, but a well-reasoned plot isn't a *good* plot, and it means that with like... three exceptions i can think of over the entire 90s trek era, every holodeck malfunction episode is basically exactly the same.
@MorningSong @ami_angelwings They definitely overutilized the idea way too much, I'll agree with that. It never should have even become a trope in the first place... Just like a one-off.