Why would anyone make a replicant?

[Stark]

If its fiction and things are explicitly unreal, isn't the 'unscientific' part outright rejecting things that happen (ie evidence) in favour of clearly irrelevant laws or theories? If a man eats an orange and grows to 100 feet tall in a story, saying WAH WAH THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE isn't just missing the point, its rejecting evidence.

When you complain someone makes a 'bad' decision (probably based on your largely omniscient perspective) maybe you should try thinking about why the character made the decision, what information they had to hand, what their goals and priorities were, so that you can understand what is being said implicitly by the text rather than saying WAH WAH THAT'S STUPID.

[Simon_Jester]

There are obvious exceptions. Say, stories about the indomitability of the human spirit in which the protagonists do physically impossible things literally, explicitly, because of their burning ambition and spirit. In that case, the 'unreality' is actually a self-contained part of the story's premise, and if the writing is good it will be handled in a way that doesn't trigger cognitive dissonance except in stupid people.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that. If you talk of burning ambition and spirit, it could be someone saying "I want to be the very best, Like no one ever was" or "risin' up to the challenge of our rival." In a lot of anime there is a complete validation of the concept that you can achieve the impossible so long as you have reached a point of emotional explosion. Your conviction shapes reality. The robot you pilot fights better if you are super pissed-off.

...I think we are in agreement, because that's my point.

It is a core premise of Japanese fiction (and a lot of other fiction) that passionate emotion can give people special strength. Love can make people endure the unendurable, rage can make them deadly warriors, and so on. In real life this isn't always true, but it's close enough to our human experience that we accept it.

And some fictional settings deliberately take this and crank it up to great lengths; there's one Japanese giant robot story whose name I can't remember that I've heard referenced in this way.

The point is that you don't normally want to see, or expect to see, some killjoy going "but it can't happen that way because in real life being passionate about success doesn't let you beat a guy who's ten times stronger than you." To talk about this is to miss the point of the work- even if that would be a good premise in another, entirely different work.

What's your take on Christian fiction where faith in an invisible, unknowable deity is consistently rewarded? I grew up in a fundamentalist environment and so have an allergic reaction to that sort of material. I can't really enjoy Christian mythology in the same sense that I can Greek and Roman myths.

Faith as faith is deeper-rooted in the human experience than that, though. Faith is honoring your commitments and obligations, faith is continuing to trust in people even when you aren't being given day to day evidence on demand of their support. Life would be very hard if people did not 'keep faith' with one another.

And that idea predates Christianity. Remember the story of Baucis and Philemon...

So there too, I think that the emotional resonance of a 'faith story' can make it good. Although like a story about how hot-blooded courage makes you powerful, or love makes you overcome obstacles, bad writing can still ruin it.

Lord of the Rings had a great example of the question of faith and belief. The final confrontation before the Black Gate of Mordor, there's no reason to believe Sam and Frodo are even still alive. all Aragorn has to go on is faith. However, even a confirmed atheist would tell him he's dead if the quest fails, if Frodo doesn't destroy the ring. So if you're dead either way if Frodo fails, why not send the army to the Gates on the off chance he succeeds? If not, you'll tie tired instead of rested.

And that's an entirely different story. Just because a fatalistic atheist might come to the same conclusion as Aragorn there does not mean he's the same man. The same fatalist might have made very different decisions at other places in the story, and wound up with a very different outcome.

It's a mistake to assume that because Belief A and Belief B cause the same outcomes in Situation C, they are interchangeable.

[Stark]

The beginnings of fiction was probably people spinning shit they knew was false about semi-mythical figures or events. I bet even the there were smug people saying OMG I KNEW HIM AND HE WASN'T 12 FEET TALL AT ALL and both missing the point and ruining it for everyone. I think this attitude is sadly linked to the kind of parrot analysis that people try, which is a shame because back in the day people knew that 'whatever happened happened and has to be explained' and not WAH WAH I DON'T LIKE IT STORY SUCKS.

Frankly when someone on a board about pew pew spaceships refuses to accept something because its 'not real' or 'doesn't make sense' it's a bit sad. Nature of fiction lost on those obsessed with the one true path to 'winning'.

[Connor MacLeod]

It can be said there's a fine line one crosses when it comes ot the technical shit and all that. Asking 'how does this work' and trying to explain it within the context of the universe is okay.. but if you cross the line and go 'It HAS to work this way because I cannot conceive of it working any other way' then you've basically gotten to the point where you try to impose your preconceptions on the given fiction (at which point said fiction stops resembling what it is, and more what you wish it to be.) And its very easy to cross that line without realizing it, I've done it a good many times over the years and I still am never sure I know where the line is, and I've seen people do it quite a bit (its also one of the underlying aspects of HARD sci fi I've so often found distasteful, because that 'imposing preconceptions' can blossom into outright arrogance towards anything not of your narrow view of fiction, which is even WORSE.)

A good example would be Avatar, and the whole RAR HUMANS SHOULD CRUSH THE NAVI VIA GIANT SPACE ROCKS, a concept that pretty blatantly (and disturbingly) crossed the line between analysis and into the 'imposed dogma' territory.

[Stark]

That's the role of subjectivity, yeah; acknowledging that the meaning you react to exists somewhere between the work and your mind. This is no good when you want to condemn something, and when you do so (as I often do) you're basically saying 'this work and all the subjective visions of it people might have all suck because I can't see the sailboat'.

If people can admit that internal logic is more important than REALIZM, they should understand that not all texts present their meanings in the same way or even in an obvious way. By reacting to a surface level or rejecting engagement you're missing the actual content and then Asking 'where is the actual content'.

[jollyreaper]

A good example would be Avatar, and the whole RAR HUMANS SHOULD CRUSH THE NAVI VIA GIANT SPACE ROCKS, a concept that pretty blatantly (and disturbingly) crossed the line between analysis and into the 'imposed dogma' territory.

I think Cameron did a good job of explaining why the humans had limited-enough resources that the Navi could win. But there is a tremendously huge "what next?" question. Humans need unobtanium, doing without isn't an option. Theoretically they could just drop a couple rocks, wreck the biosphere and cheerfully mine a moonscape. The only thing holding them back would be political fallout back home. But that's clearly a question beyond the scope of the first film. And it was very fashionable to hate on Avatar. Personally, I found it to be a very conventional story played safe but artfully executed. Given how so many films can't even get exposition and pacing right or even give us sympathetic characters, doing something simple well is no small feat.

[Stark]

Are you aware you didn't actually respond to his thought, and in fact demonstrate you are in the 'trap' he describes?

I ask, because sometimes it looks like you simply rephrase what you've already said as a 'response' to people's posts.

[jollyreaper]

I thought my reply elaborated on the avatar example, the film taking as much criticism for what it isn't as for what it was.

I think the miscommunication that happens here, in this thread and elsewhere, is I think I say "I can't think of a way to do this, can anyone else?" and it gets interpreted as "I can't, nobody else can either, therefore it sucks."

So I'll see about being more careful in wording in future threads.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

It isn't just a matter of wording. You seem to latch onto very specific interpretations and then not even see it as an interpretation, but as a fact. A very good example is what you said about Avatar: "Humans need unobtanium, doing without isn't an option." This is an assumption many people come into the film with, and probably drives a lot of the distaste of humanity not killing everyone from space For The Greater Good, but it's just that, an assumption. It has no support from the film and actually a lot of evidence against it, but here's the thing. Some people are so latched onto the assumption that they see the evidence against it as simply bad writing, since the film is being inconsistent... but not with itself, rather a preconception they made up. And that's something a lot of people could help their enjoyment of fiction by learning. If something seems wrong about the work, try looking at it from different perspectives and talking with people, since not only will that bring new perspectives in, but help identify when you're applying unfounded assumptions.

[jollyreaper]

That is a very good point, the evidence given for that position comes from the guy in charge of running the mining operation. I'm not sure which parts of the movie suggest that claim is false (deleted scenes, commentary from other characters?) but it's an unproven assumption given as fact. I simply ran with it for the nuking the planet analysis. But yes, there's any number of questions you can ask with the premise. Unobtanium is not an element but some weird alloy arising from a quirk of paradoran development as a moon orbiting a gas giant with a powerful magnetic field. This explains why we can't just mine it in our own asteroid belt or in the pandoran belts. (This is from the fluff.) But if it uses regular elements, why can we not synthesize it? We can't tell from the film.

But the conclusion we can infer from the movie is that whatever the options are, mining the material from a planet full of hostile natives is cheaper than their only other options for sourcing it or else they would take the cheaper option. Assuming there's not any other ulterior motive for running such an operation on Pandora.

Is the only solution to Earth's woes the use of unobtanium? The people who make fortunes selling it would believe this to be so.

Something else I didn't mention that might be of use, biodiversity hotspots are full of economically useful species to be exploited by industry. New drugs, new targets for biomomicry engineering, etc. The mineral rights on Pandora might pale in comparison to the genetic rights. Has anyone tried exploiting that angle yet? Who else might have a stake in the planet?

[Ahriman238]

Presumably all that would be explored in the sequel, we DO see that the scientists are studying Pandoran plant life. In the novelization, Pandora produces antibodies that swiftly eliminate diseases brought in by the humans (no sickness on Pandora) and the RDA is gleefully bringing bacteria samples to Pandora to produce cures to all terrestrial diseases.

But that's a sideshow, the main point is people bringing their own interpretation to a work, which may or may not be supported by the story. The common rejoinder to "Earth desperately needs unobtanium" is that Selfrigde never says anything of the sort, he says "This is why we're here, because this little grey rock sells for 20 million a kilo." Not "because the people of Earth will die without this."

[jollyreaper]

Hmm. I will need to check on that. I was pretty sure that was heavily implied or even expressed but I think it was outside of the movie, possibly on the movie website. I don't think I'm misremembering fanwank.

How far does the novel vary from the film or does it expand on the film without much contradiction? The tidbits you just mentioned are very interesting.

[The Yosemite Bear]

how about can I just make a robot out of clay, and put punchcards in it's head?

[Connor MacLeod]

This is true. But what's the use of being an insufferable bastard if you'll never, ever, ever like the material? I watched the Yamato 2199 remake. It's really, really Japanese space opera, hardcore, not dispute. It's enjoyable in those terms. You do have to accept the premise going in or else you'll be forever questioning things that nobody else cares about.

I'm not sure where 'not liking' something translates into 'bastard' - if you dislike something that's all there is to it (whatever the justification), but that doesn't automatically make a value judgment about the person. HOW they express that dislike, however, is another matter. The omnipresent HUR HUR MECHS SUCK stuff or the LAWL TREK SUCKS stuff that has cropped up on this board historically is a good example, and its been one of the principle barriers to anything ersembling 'interesting' discussion. People get too busy defending/attacking that there's no room for discussion.

Moreover, how do you know for certain you would 'never, ever' like the material? Ask me a few years ago and I'd say (honestly) 'I'd never watch Gundam'. And what have I been watching? Gundam. Attitudes change, and 'never, ever' is a long time to be making commitments. And if we're so intransigent we hardly ever change even over time, then we probably have bigger problems than 'not liking anime'.

I give Gundam props for some of the concepts they ran with. No FTL (did they ever use it in later series?), most action constrained to Cislunar space, no aliens, O'Neill colonies, real robots and not self-aware super robots, etc.

Gundam isn't SUPER HARD sci fi per se, but it fits into the 'loose' interpretations of Hard sci fi that lead to shit like 'giant relativistic kill projectiles killing enemy empires', or the 'as long as its permissible within science or at least possible, its hard' definition of things. Heck even with the giant robot space fighters Gundam can be quite harder than alot of popularly 'hard' sci fi.

And thats something I would have never said had I not actually watched the series myself.

Well, it all depends on how you try to explain it. It's not the sort of thing you explain with hard science, you explain it by what would be more cool. Warhammer is about aesthetics rather than logical extrapolation. I can enjoy Warhammer for what it is, in part because it clearly explains what it is not.

Who says Warhammer 40K is 'about' aesthetics?

I kept wanting them to cut thrusters, rotate 180 degrees and fire back at the Imperials.

I don't see any reason to, since that keeps you in the enemy's arc. It would make more sense to move laterally whilst rotating, or dodging sideways and reducing velocity (letting the enemy shoot by.) But thats kind of beside the point, since I was pointing out SW doesn't really manuever like WW2 fighters except in the sense they sometimes 'turn' in space, which is hardly implausible (just relatively inefficient.)

It can be tough navigating this sort of minefield. Myself, I like to find out if a person means what he appears to have said before getting miffed. But I can see how some might flame first, ask questions later.

Again that's why you have to be careful about the words you say and how you phrase them, and how they might be misconstrued. Which I probably should feel guilty about reiterating, because I'm not ALWAYS careful myself, but I'm generally better about it than I used to be.

Yeah. I can respect vigorous purple/green debates. But when an author expressly says "In the premise of this story, purple wins," it is vexing to have so many people arguing with the assumption.

IT is, but its very pervasive and done quite often. As I've said the Na'Vi/AVatar example, the whole 'mechs suck' thing, etc. I find that people often do it instinctively (to varying degrees) without even realizing it because its so pervasie (EG everyone does it, so its okay if I do it.) Of course that's the same mindset that created the 'flametastic' attitude that can pervade SDN, too..

That kind of gets me into my zombie territory. So long as you never explain how zombies work and scientists are freaking out about all the ways they shouldn't be, I'm fine. For me, scientific inexplicability is a zombie core characteristic right after "undead" and "hungry." You start explaining zombies, now I'm sucked out of the illusion and telling you why it can't work.

There's lots of ways you could envision 'zombies' working, depending on how you contrive the setting. My personal bias has always been 'some sort of animating force inhabiting an fleshy golem/robotesque shell. That's actually how I tend to view most undead from a get go, but I have to be careful not to project that into every fictional context because it won't always work.

I think Cameron did a good job of explaining why the humans had limited-enough resources that the Navi could win. But there is a tremendously huge "what next?" question. Humans need unobtanium, doing without isn't an option. Theoretically they could just drop a couple rocks, wreck the biosphere and cheerfully mine a moonscape. The only thing holding them back would be political fallout back home. But that's clearly a question beyond the scope of the first film. And it was very fashionable to hate on Avatar. Personally, I found it to be a very conventional story played safe but artfully executed. Given how so many films can't even get exposition and pacing right or even give us sympathetic characters, doing something simple well is no small feat.

I'm not sure if you added this just as an 'aside' comment or you thought you were actually responding to what I said, but if its the latter.. you kinda did ignore what I was aiming at (maybe I didnt explain it in a way that gelled with you, I dunno.) but it goes back to all those discussions a few years back when the movie came out and you had a bunch fo people saying RAR HUMANS SHOULD KILL ALL THE NA'VI THE MOVIE MADE NO SENSE or some variation of that.. that mindset that lead to NecronLord's thread here about all the 'military' aspects of Avatar. That's a very good example of 'preconceptions trying to force themselves onto fiction.'

[Guardsman Bass]

With mecha, I could see a situation where if you assume away the issues with stability and extra required power generation, then it could make sense compared to vehicles that would have a lower target profile and lower ground pressure when standing. If you have to go to war with the limited resources you have, and already have a bunch of people trained in using mechs for civilian purposes (such as space construction), then mecha might make sense as "all-in-one" machines designed to allow a military to use its limited supply of pilots in as many of the diverse arenas of battle that they might face as is possible. If you have dedicated civilian mech production, then perhaps it would be easier to shift over to making mechs modified for military purposes as opposed to coming up with a diverse array of military vehicles for which you have no precedent in either manufacturing, logistics, or trained personnel to use them.

[Stark]

Or ... They could be conclusively and repeatedly demonstrated to be better. Responding so seeing such with 'that's impossible' or 'just make better tanks' borders on denial.

In gundam for instance, mobile suits are space fighters. They're pressed into service as ground units, and they're shown to have the agility and speed to defeat rival forces. While this is a transient thing and people could (you imagine) just make better tanks, they'll always need mobile suits in the space fighter role and so it makes economic sense to continue to use them on the ground. New tanks are designed and fielded but never retake the importance they lost, especially in the context of the low intensity conflict that takes place in that environment.

In this way it's irrelevant to say what's best or realistic. Looking from within you can see how it hangs together in an organic way, and trying to dismiss it with outside ideas like 'its wrong' doesn't really make sense. I think suboptimal decisions being made for reasonable reasons and driven by need rather than abstract 'correctness' adds to the setting, rather than subtracts - because it's 'realistic' with regard to people, politics, decision-making, etc.

In other ways the same argument is used - people in the Mist make sub optimal decisions under stress. Person in horror movie is foolish. This is a part of the narrative and not a 'mistake' or 'error'.

[Guardsman Bass]

Or ... They could be conclusively and repeatedly demonstrated to be better. Responding so seeing such with 'that's impossible' or 'just make better tanks' borders on denial.

But what does it mean for them to be "better"? You can assume that the engineering isn't a problem, but you can't hand-wave away stuff like mechs have a higher target profile than tanks. You just have to think of reasons why they're used, which I did and you do below.

In fact, you echo my point about the "economic" angle. It might be cheaper and easier for them to just re-purpose mechs for a wider variety of purposes instead of building a host of different vehicles for different purposes, even if those vehicles actually might be better in their respective specialties. That was the whole point of my post, plus the angle about making sure of a supply of pilots.

[Stark]

Well that's it - I doon't mean it's meaningless to criticise the design in engineering ways (or whatever) so long as people actually see what they can do (ie say its impossible for them to run at 250kmh because SCIENCE). What I mean is their presence in the story might have other, valid reasons that someone who says HAHA MECHS UNREALISTIC won't even bother to look for.

Using another Gundam example, it took them a decade to make a cost-efficient transforming mobile suit, so for ten years there were only a few testbeds and prototypes. They kept plugging away on low-rate production and special projects, and once it worked they mass produced whole classes of such space fighters. You could come in at the start (or end) of that process and say THIS IS STUPID OMG, but if you can see the whole process it looks much less 'arbitrary'.

I guess I'm being unclear but I think it's valuable for people to consider the why rather than inventing a why and saying THAT WAS A STUPID WHY I JUST MADE UP. Like the OP: replicants are stupid and uneconomical because I assume they are.

[jollyreaper]

This is true. But what's the use of being an insufferable bastard if you'll never, ever, ever like the material? I watched the Yamato 2199 remake. It's really, really Japanese space opera, hardcore, not dispute. It's enjoyable in those terms. You do have to accept the premise going in or else you'll be forever questioning things that nobody else cares about.

I'm not sure where 'not liking' something translates into 'bastard' - if you dislike something that's all there is to it (whatever the justification), but that doesn't automatically make a value judgment about the person. HOW they express that dislike, however, is another matter. The omnipresent HUR HUR MECHS SUCK stuff or the LAWL TREK SUCKS stuff that has cropped up on this board historically is a good example, and its been one of the principle barriers to anything ersembling 'interesting' discussion. People get too busy defending/attacking that there's no room for discussion.

That's what I meant about being an insufferable bastard. I have no idea why Ponies are popular. I can't understand what the appeal is. But I don't go no about it because it really doesn't bother me. Something like the Star Wars prequels bothered me more because it was doing poorly something I loved. But that's a horse that's been beaten to a paste, no use going into it here.

Moreover, how do you know for certain you would 'never, ever' like the material? Ask me a few years ago and I'd say (honestly) 'I'd never watch Gundam'. And what have I been watching? Gundam. Attitudes change, and 'never, ever' is a long time to be making commitments. And if we're so intransigent we hardly ever change even over time, then we probably have bigger problems than 'not liking anime'.

This is true. It took me a long time to get into Lord of the Rings. I never got into Farscape when it was on. It's nominally my kind of genre but I didn't get to start from the beginning and the mid-season episodes I saw never appealed. Might be worth going back and giving it a shot now that everything is online. Something I wouldn't be into? Yaoi. Sports anime. Even if they're pinacles of their genre, I'm just not going to be into the subject matter. JJ Abrams projects? Ah, that's the rub. He usually works in genres I'm a sucker for but with the exception of Cloverfield, I haven't liked his work.

I dislike magic girl anime but Magical Witch Punie-chan is great, most likely because it's a send-up of the whole idea.

Gundam isn't SUPER HARD sci fi per se, but it fits into the 'loose' interpretations of Hard sci fi that lead to shit like 'giant relativistic kill projectiles killing enemy empires', or the 'as long as its permissible within science or at least possible, its hard' definition of things. Heck even with the giant robot space fighters Gundam can be quite harder than alot of popularly 'hard' sci fi.

And thats something I would have never said had I not actually watched the series myself.

Yup. I was stoked to see O'Neill colonies exactly like the ones depicted in the High Frontier. They didn't BS the stuff they didn't have to. Of course, there are so many shows with alternate timelines it's hard to keep them all straight. Thank Zod for Wikipedia.

Well, it all depends on how you try to explain it. It's not the sort of thing you explain with hard science, you explain it by what would be more cool. Warhammer is about aesthetics rather than logical extrapolation. I can enjoy Warhammer for what it is, in part because it clearly explains what it is not.

Who says Warhammer 40K is 'about' aesthetics?
[/quote]

Fair question. Warhammer 40k seems to be about atmosphere and aesthetics and, I hesitate to invoke a trope, "rule of cool." It's trying to be the grim, dark future of humanity and turn everything up to eleven to support those themes. Everything is crafted and shaped to provide the maximum possible personal drama while telling tales that can become apocalyptic in scale. There can be smaller stories of desperation in the undercities of hiveworlds but most of the Warhammer stories are set in the middle of the great wars. I'm sure there's probably a few stories about minor adepts on forgeworlds far from the warzone puzzling over archaeotech but I haven't seen them yet. There's room for some humor with the orks but for the most part they're trying to play the grimdark straight and horrifying. Could the Imperium ever win and bring about galactic peace? Well, it wouldn't be Warhammer then, would it? The setting isn't trying to convince you with the plausibility of how a million world Imperium could function, the details of agriworlds and forgeworlds and how enough shipping could be run through the Warp when we're told it's very dangerous. This isn't that sort of setting, it's not about fussy details and time tables and the like.

I don't see any reason to, since that keeps you in the enemy's arc. It would make more sense to move laterally whilst rotating, or dodging sideways and reducing velocity (letting the enemy shoot by.) But thats kind of beside the point, since I was pointing out SW doesn't really manuever like WW2 fighters except in the sense they sometimes 'turn' in space, which is hardly implausible (just relatively inefficient.)

The 180 thing is specifically about the Death Star trench run. For whatever reason, they couldn't make the approach perpendicular to the opening, they had to run the trench. Presumably it protected them from turbolasers on the surface. Ok, that's cool. But TIE's are chewing up their asses. It would have been useful if they could cut engines and turn to blast their pursuers instead of just hoping they could last until they reached the launch point.

What I find interesting is even in recent shows where starfighters fly in a cinematic fashion (nBSG, nYamato) we are seeing reaction control thrusters firing. I liked the scene in Yamato where the enemy pilot executes a Pugachev's Cobra to get on the tail of the pursuing Terran fighter, even though the specific maneuver relies on atmospheric drag to slow the aircraft and they were both in hard vacuum. Still, the thrusters fired for the whole maneuver and it still looked awesome so what the hell.

Again that's why you have to be careful about the words you say and how you phrase them, and how they might be misconstrued. Which I probably should feel guilty about reiterating, because I'm not ALWAYS careful myself, but I'm generally better about it than I used to be.

I'll try it going forward. We shall see how it goes.

IT is, but its very pervasive and done quite often. As I've said the Na'Vi/AVatar example, the whole 'mechs suck' thing, etc. I find that people often do it instinctively (to varying degrees) without even realizing it because its so pervasie (EG everyone does it, so its okay if I do it.) Of course that's the same mindset that created the 'flametastic' attitude that can pervade SDN, too..

What I really love is when the creators are fully aware of the flaws with the thing they want to do and they take pains to make it feel plausible, to seduce your disbelief into giving up.

There's lots of ways you could envision 'zombies' working, depending on how you contrive the setting. My personal bias has always been 'some sort of animating force inhabiting an fleshy golem/robotesque shell. That's actually how I tend to view most undead from a get go, but I have to be careful not to project that into every fictional context because it won't always work.

So long as you never make specific claims, nobody can falsify your explanation. The golem force could well explain walking skeletons. If we invoke specific supernatural explanations, I always like the idea that the soul does not exist before life. The soul is formed as a zygote grows into a fetus and into a baby, accumulating and becoming defined in energy the same way the body is defined in matter. And matter surrounded by spirit picks up a psychic charge, the same way ferrous metals can become magnetized when exposed to electricity.

If I were writing a zombie story and didn't want to get into larger implications, I'd stick with "we can't explain it" and leave it at that. Because if we can start explaining it, holy shit! The scientists are going to be all over this shit. Yeah, half the world is trying to chew off your face but if you can figure out what's going on, this is going to change everything! I would find it frustrating if something like your golem explanation were introduced into a story and none of the scientists stopped to ask what the implications would be, what this tells us about the natural world we didn't know before.

I'm not sure if you added this just as an 'aside' comment or you thought you were actually responding to what I said, but if its the latter.. you kinda did ignore what I was aiming at (maybe I didnt explain it in a way that gelled with you, I dunno.)

I could have dundered right past it.

but it goes back to all those discussions a few years back when the movie came out and you had a bunch fo people saying RAR HUMANS SHOULD KILL ALL THE NA'VI THE MOVIE MADE NO SENSE or some variation of that.. that mindset that lead to NecronLord's thread here about all the 'military' aspects of Avatar. That's a very good example of 'preconceptions trying to force themselves onto fiction.'

Yeah. I get what you're saying. Sometimes the writer doesn't explain things properly, other times he did and the audience just isn't paying attention. I will confess that if I liked a movie, I will try to solve the apparent plot holes in its favor; if I disliked the movie, I'm going to be less kind. I'm not feeling kind towards Battlefield Earth. For Avatar, I'll be kind and, as I said, I think he did take the time to resolve a lot of the plot holes. Terminator has a number of potential holes, especially when factoring in the second movie, but they were both so enjoyable I want to patch them up. The second two, not so much.

[jollyreaper]

In this way it's irrelevant to say what's best or realistic. Looking from within you can see how it hangs together in an organic way, and trying to dismiss it with outside ideas like 'its wrong' doesn't really make sense. I think suboptimal decisions being made for reasonable reasons and driven by need rather than abstract 'correctness' adds to the setting, rather than subtracts - because it's 'realistic' with regard to people, politics, decision-making, etc.

I'm more than happy to concede the point in Gundam since that's the story they're telling. There's the question of mecha engineering in Gundamland and there's the question of mecha engineering in our world. Similarly, lightsaber tactics in the Star Wars setting would differ from lightsaber tactics in the real world because we don't have the Force and therefore no super-reflexes or precognition. As far as real-world mecha goes, we can debate the essential axioms: it's always easier to armor a box than a humanoid form, that a propulsion and weapons system would be easier to install in a box and turret than a robot, that the articulation system would add more complexity and failure modes. Arguing the practicality of Gundams would be like arguing the body plan of the Zentraedi in Macross. 50 foot tall humans wouldn't work? Of course they wouldn't. But that's the story they're telling. Get over that and you're in for some great 80's space opera.

In other ways the same argument is used - people in the Mist make sub optimal decisions under stress. Person in horror movie is foolish. This is a part of the narrative and not a 'mistake' or 'error'.

There's a fundamental difference here. In the Mist (and I LOVE the Mist, both the novella and the movie) the characters make poor choices and pay for it. It's very realistic in that sense; average Americans doing poorly when the world comes undone. The average American ain't an action movie hero. They're mistakes and we can argue what they should have done the same way we debate the decisions of generals in wars. We don't doubt that it happened, we simply talk of what could have been.

Usually when we complain about idiot characters is we don't have any sympathy for them and they make conventional, stupid horror movie mistakes. Let's split up! There's a scary noise in the room, I'm going to investigate! We get frustrated because of the cliche.

There was a news story today about a woman who was caught in a late spring blizzard. She was trapped in her car and then tried to walk to aid. Her son was able to find shelter but she died in the show. What she did was incredibly stupid and tragic. It remains a believable mistake. I'm sure the outdoorsmen are groaning in disbelief when they hear of this. But she was a real woman and made a believably stupid decision in a situation beyond her experience.

But when it comes to storytelling, what really burns people is when someone makes a dumb decision and it pays off in a way that's beyond what they feel a dumb decision could account for. In the Mist it was a total punch to the gut for our hero to see the seemingly stupid woman from the start of the movie, the one who ran out into the mist to rescue her children, ride by in the amtrack safe and sound while he's sitting there screaming with his boy's blood literally on his hands. That felt true to me. Long odds, certainly, but possible. What tears it for people is when the odds don't just seem long but impossible. No way, no how, cannot be done.

If we want to talk about believable mistakes, the star of Buckwild died because he went mudding at 3am in the morning, got his truck stuck in the mud and the cabin filled with exhaust fumes and he suffocated. Took two passengers with him. That was incredibly stupid but completely within character. None of us would accept this as a death for a character presented as cunning, capable, and possessed of keen intelligence. Death by uncharacteristic mistake is possible but it would have to feel more genuine. Even a slip and fall on sidewalk ice could be unexpected and fatal. Or perhaps a lapse in fieldcraft, feeling complacent in a place of comfort. It's a mistake that feels human rather than imposed by a writer looking to cram a plotline into place.

[Stark]

But what I'm saying is that the judgement of 'worthwhile payoff' is entirely arbitrary and subjective, and so calling it 'bad writing' is wrong. It you think something is a good payoff and I don't, is the writing in a quantum state of badness or is it just that we view the work from different perspectives and with different preconceptions? If you change your view upon explanation, does the writing that occurred in the past change and become good?

Ages ago we had some chats here about Sunshine, a movie that many people didn't like. But when people talked about it and thought openly about different things, some of them came to change their view and see new value or meaning. This is what Connor means when he talks of thinking about a work as a process. It's not a one-step 'this box or that box' thing, it's a conscious and ongoing process of evaluation. And there's nothing wrong with simply not evaluating it - recently I was asked about Total Recall, a movie I will never see because I pre-judged it as valueless. Is this wrong? No. Is it wron for me to attack the movie or people who like it from a lazy position of ignorance simple because I chose to not like it? Probably.

[jollyreaper]

But what I'm saying is that the judgement of 'worthwhile payoff' is entirely arbitrary and subjective, and so calling it 'bad writing' is wrong. It you think something is a good payoff and I don't, is the writing in a quantum state of badness or is it just that we view the work from different perspectives and with different preconceptions? If you change your view upon explanation, does the writing that occurred in the past change and become good?

That's a good question. I can respect an effort I don't understand even while I dislike an effort I think is lazy and uninspired. This may seem like kicking the can since one person's genuine effort can be another's lazy.

Ages ago we had some chats here about Sunshine, a movie that many people didn't like. But when people talked about it and thought openly about different things, some of them came to change their view and see new value or meaning. This is what Connor means when he talks of thinking about a work as a process. It's not a one-step 'this box or that box' thing, it's a conscious and ongoing process of evaluation. And there's nothing wrong with simply not evaluating it - recently I was asked about Total Recall, a movie I will never see because I pre-judged it as valueless. Is this wrong? No. Is it wron for me to attack the movie or people who like it from a lazy position of ignorance simple because I chose to not like it? Probably.

I'm always willing to be proven wrong. There are many movies I give a pass to based solely on the trailer. When I actually see them, I'm seldom proven wrong. Seldom, though; there are occasions when I realize I was so damn wrong and am grateful for the experience.

I never saw Sunshine but know the gist of it. It sounded crushingly conventional complete with a slasher horror villain in space.

It really comes down to the question of whether I feel that I lack understanding because the writer is one step ahead of me or whether it's because the story doesn't make any damn sense. Yes, this is subjective but enjoyment is also subjective. There are plenty of things greatly enjoyed by consumers that will lay beyond my appreciation. Whether it is objectively bad or an acquired taste, it still comes down to your own palate.

[Stark]

Why do you use so much competitive language when describing the author or their intentions? It's not a competition. You even restate that your pre-judgements are 'correct' because you were predisposed to agree with them in a process demonstrably subjective!

What people are trying to communicate to you is that understanding a work might not be obvious, simple, immediate or even pleasant. If you go to see a movie having decided its shit, of COURSE you're 'right' because you are at an immediate penalty to engage with it. I do this literally all the time and it days more about me than art. However, engaging with things you are prejudiced against is probably the most valuable way to improving your understanding of fiction and art.

[Connor MacLeod]

That's what I meant about being an insufferable bastard. I have no idea why Ponies are popular. I can't understand what the appeal is. But I don't go no about it because it really doesn't bother me. Something like the Star Wars prequels bothered me more because it was doing poorly something I loved. But that's a horse that's been beaten to a paste, no use going into it here.

I don't 'get' the pony thing, but I think I can understand it on some level. There are lots of people I know and interact with who are passionate about things I do not personally care for, but I can relate to still because I can understand the reasons behind the passion. I can understand being so 'into' something. Being able to understand that means I can put myself in their position better, and thus I can relate in other ways - such as why Trekkies may not like having ot put up with having STar Trek put down (esp in favor of Star Wars) so often, which was a prevalent feature of this board for so long (a sort of groupthink.) I've been in a position enough to have things I like mocked too, and those two things make it easy for me to put myself in their shoes, and therefore not be a prick about things I don't like. Sort of a Golden Rule thing.

Also it helps to distinguish between criticism and antagonism. Its possible to have the former without having the latter, but some people identify so deeply that they conflate the two.

This is true. It took me a long time to get into Lord of the Rings. I never got into Farscape when it was on. It's nominally my kind of genre but I didn't get to start from the beginning and the mid-season episodes I saw never appealed. Might be worth going back and giving it a shot now that everything is online. Something I wouldn't be into? Yaoi. Sports anime. Even if they're pinacles of their genre, I'm just not going to be into the subject matter. JJ Abrams projects? Ah, that's the rub. He usually works in genres I'm a sucker for but with the exception of Cloverfield, I haven't liked his work.

Dude, we're talking science fiction. We're not getting off into sexual proclivities or hobbies... can we at least try to say fairly relevant? Holding different opinions or likes in fiction (or exploring different things, or testing your limits fictionwise) is not a deviancy There's a ton of stuff I don't watch or read, but that doesn't mean I actively dislike it so much as I am disinterested.

I 'dislike' Neon Genesis Evangelion for example, but it is something I have watched through entirely and thats WHY.. the series just didn't synch with me the way it can with some. I've not always understood why, I just know I didn't like it (and for a long time I was very militant and even antagonistic in that dislike), but its only in recent years I've been able to verbalize why. But my dislike is a personal thing, it doesn't mean the fiction is horrible, or that my feelings on it make it any less well designed or written (I happen to think NGE is another anime that is quite 'internally consistent' and plausible, in its own way, just like Gundam is.) It just doesn't suit me. But I had to actually expose myself to it to KNOW that for sure.

I dislike magic girl anime but Magical Witch Punie-chan is great, most likely because it's a send-up of the whole idea.

that's not unusual. I have a disinterets in 'fight' anime in general, and yet I am still rather fond of One Piece (which I havent watched in ages... because I get caught up in other things like Gundam, or Detective Conan... )

Can you see a sort of pattern in all this? You often seem to speak in terms of absolutes (sometimes, I suspect, without even realizing it) when things aren't really that absolute.. many things are alot more relative than we're willing to admit or realize, if we would just take time to re-examine it from a different angle.

Taking things in a more 'relative' rather than 'absolute' context can seem scary because its not nice and neat and predictable, but I can say that having been exposed to it, it actually feels liberating. I'm not enslaved to my preconceptions, and it hasn't hampered my enjoyment of things to broaden my horizons or embrace alternative viewpoints.

Yup. I was stoked to see O'Neill colonies exactly like the ones depicted in the High Frontier. They didn't BS the stuff they didn't have to. Of course, there are so many shows with alternate timelines it's hard to keep them all straight. Thank Zod for Wikipedia.

What's rreally drawn me to alot of stuff like Gundam (and before that LOGH) is that they are series that have managed to create a sort of sci fi that I often consider very ideal because of how very well balanced it is. It can be technical as fuck (Stark and I spend quite a bit of time discussing the technical details of gundam and shit) and it is amazingly interanlly consistent (far more than Star Wars ever was, ICS included) which is enough to make any hard-science nerd cry tears of joy... but the best thing is that the story and characters do not suffer for the technical stuff. Quite often the technical details may actually play important roles within the actual story. And the contrast between ''hard' sci fi elements and something that is considered 'soft' like giant robots or minvosky shit is actually also attractive, because of that hybrid nature - Gundam is free to draw on the best of both camps and weave it into a compelling tale if it chooses, rather than restricting itself to just one or the other. That makes it distinctive.

That is not to say that ALL science fiction should be identical to Gundam, but their approach to fiction and storytelling is, IMHO, something that is quite worth emulating, because they have a very good approach to it and its open ended and flexible enough to be adapted to many different ideas (it would work in a more traditional 'star wars' type approach where you have 'good vs evil' or 'hereos vs bad guys' just as ti works with the 'everyone is human' approach Gundam usually takes.)

Fair question. Warhammer 40k seems to be about atmosphere and aesthetics and, I hesitate to invoke a trope, "rule of cool." It's trying to be the grim, dark future of humanity and turn everything up to eleven to support those themes. Everything is crafted and shaped to provide the maximum possible personal drama while telling tales that can become apocalyptic in scale. There can be smaller stories of desperation in the undercities of hiveworlds but most of the Warhammer stories are set in the middle of the great wars. I'm sure there's probably a few stories about minor adepts on forgeworlds far from the warzone puzzling over archaeotech but I haven't seen them yet. There's room for some humor with the orks but for the most part they're trying to play the grimdark straight and horrifying. Could the Imperium ever win and bring about galactic peace? Well, it wouldn't be Warhammer then, would it? The setting isn't trying to convince you with the plausibility of how a million world Imperium could function, the details of agriworlds and forgeworlds and how enough shipping could be run through the Warp when we're told it's very dangerous. This isn't that sort of setting, it's not about fussy details and time tables and the like.

I don't think Warhammer is about any 'one' thing, because 40K (and WHF really) are basically a fictional setting that has begged, borrowed, and stolen conceptually from virtually any other sort of fiction at some point. It's even more of a glorious hodgepodge of weird and different ideas than Gundam is, and that open-endedness.. the sheer sandboxiness.. is part of the charm. Trying to reduce it to mere 'aesthetics' is too confining, evne though I know many 40K fans themselves try to do that because they prefer things to be predictable and simple and structured.

40K has borrowed from everything, and incorporated no canon policies except 'everything is true.. and not true.. depending on how you look at it'. It is not wrong to say it can literally be whatever one wants to make of it, by and large, which runs contrary to that 'rule of cool' idea (you're not the first to say it, but it makes me laugh every time someone says it because it trivializes the depth and complexity one can actually find in the setting if one looks.) Juts because it has magic and swords and wizards and demons does not mean its childish or arbitrary or simple.

The 180 thing is specifically about the Death Star trench run. For whatever reason, they couldn't make the approach perpendicular to the opening, they had to run the trench. Presumably it protected them from turbolasers on the surface. Ok, that's cool. But TIE's are chewing up their asses. It would have been useful if they could cut engines and turn to blast their pursuers instead of just hoping they could last until they reached the launch point.

Except you can't see where you're going. The trenches were't completely empty. WE saw gun turrets in them (for example) and if you're not paying attnetion you can crash. Nevermind that they will probably figure out that you're turning and blast you the minute you try to turn and line up on them. There's also the not-so minor fact that the strongest engines are facing backwards as well.

What I find interesting is even in recent shows where starfighters fly in a cinematic fashion (nBSG, nYamato) we are seeing reaction control thrusters firing. I liked the scene in Yamato where the enemy pilot executes a Pugachev's Cobra to get on the tail of the pursuing Terran fighter, even though the specific maneuver relies on atmospheric drag to slow the aircraft and they were both in hard vacuum. Still, the thrusters fired for the whole maneuver and it still looked awesome so what the hell.

You see that quite alot in Gundam as well. Mobile suits are actually amazingly agile in space and make use of three dimensions quite easily, and its quite easy to see why they originated in space rather than as a ground combat vehicle (That was really more of an afterthought. The whole conceptualization of mobile suits vs other combat vehicles is actually well explained in Gundam, if one knows where to look.)

What I really love is when the creators are fully aware of the flaws with the thing they want to do and they take pains to make it feel plausible, to seduce your disbelief into giving up.

There's lots of fiction that does it. B5 tried to do it (with varying degrees of success). It really shows that, as long as your open minded, explaining things is not really that hard. tHe hard part is finding an explanation that makes everyone happy and suits their preconceptions.

So long as you never make specific claims, nobody can falsify your explanation. The golem force could well explain walking skeletons. If we invoke specific supernatural explanations, I always like the idea that the soul does not exist before life. The soul is formed as a zygote grows into a fetus and into a baby, accumulating and becoming defined in energy the same way the body is defined in matter. And matter surrounded by spirit picks up a psychic charge, the same way ferrous metals can become magnetized when exposed to electricity.

Like with fiction, it depends entirely on how the setting is made up. This is as true of fantasy and fictional elements as it is about science fiction. One of the more amusing mental exercises I've gone on over the years is trying to come up with a system of magic for harry potter. The general concept really isn't that hard, given that magic is pretty mechanical in that setting, although the specifics can be part of the problem. Of course, that's also part of the charm of such analysis, it wouldn't be interesting if there weren't problems to puzzle through. Once its all solved it starts becoming boring.

If I were writing a zombie story and didn't want to get into larger implications, I'd stick with "we can't explain it" and leave it at that. Because if we can start explaining it, holy shit! The scientists are going to be all over this shit. Yeah, half the world is trying to chew off your face but if you can figure out what's going on, this is going to change everything! I would find it frustrating if something like your golem explanation were introduced into a story and none of the scientists stopped to ask what the implications would be, what this tells us about the natural world we didn't know before.

Again this really comes down to how the setting is contrived. Like with the whole mobile suit example. People find it objectionable if giant robots are thought of as a competition or replacement for tanks (which is only true in certain settings.), but if you think of them as being something else (more analogous to a starfighter, or having roles more akin to infatnry, or a helicopter/gunship, or deliberately being designed for general purpose roles rather than specialization.) it can make a certain sense.

Yeah. I get what you're saying. Sometimes the writer doesn't explain things properly, other times he did and the audience just isn't paying attention. I will confess that if I liked a movie, I will try to solve the apparent plot holes in its favor; if I disliked the movie, I'm going to be less kind. I'm not feeling kind towards Battlefield Earth. For Avatar, I'll be kind and, as I said, I think he did take the time to resolve a lot of the plot holes. Terminator has a number of potential holes, especially when factoring in the second movie, but they were both so enjoyable I want to patch them up. The second two, not so much.

We're always more inclined to be forgiving of things we like. I'm more forgiving of Imperial Guard shit in 40K because I like the 'normal humans with rayguns' concept, but that doesn't mean I should remain oblivious of that bias - which is the hard part. But the things with Avtar again were less about 'plot holes' and more about 'people not liking things and trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole.' In that thread I linked to you could see that.. hoth was explicilty reacting to the fact he didn't like the whole 'anti technology/tribal' vibe of the story, even though that really wasn't what the story was conveying. If anything, the Na'vi were the compelte opposite of 'luddites', and the nature of their society wsa a result of the differences in their mindset (aliens) compared to humans and the nature of their enviroment (which was damn cool and near paradise, all things considered.)

I also suspect that whole 'tribal' aspect offended them in the way the RDA conflict panned out (even though as people noted the technology was winning out.) because its like a rehash of ROTJ. Except the Na'Vi aren't ewoks - they're explicitly bigger, stronger, and generally more dangeorus adversaries and that can go a long way to making up for 'tribal'.

[Elfdart]

1. The "forehead alien" element really depends on context, and that's where I think Star Trek failed. There's tons of ways you could explain it, especially since this is a setting where they have god-like beings who seem to specifically enjoy fucking around with humanity (AKA the Q). Perhaps they moved a ton of human variant populations and dropped them all over the galaxy, which would have been a better way than the "DNA programmed to generate near-humans" thing it actually was.

I always assumed that was the case since they not only look human, but they eat, drink and breathe the same things humans do -and can interbreed with them.

Because they can.

The human capacity for doing evil things to those they consider one of them is unlimited. Face it, for many people it's fun to be a cruel prick to others.