Oni Koneko Damien wrote:Shroom Man 777 wrote:Yes, the OP isn't asking for drama but for curbstomps or whatever. At least the OP has distilled the essence of lame from all of his other threads and presented it in its purest form here.
In a one-word summary: "BALLS!"
The striking thing about "BALLS!" in its original context was that
you didn't know it was going to be a curbstomp when you read that, or at least you didn't unless you had a lot of cynical background knowledge about the author.
"Legions of Hell versus Modern World" sure sounds like it could be an interesting fight, when you think about it; it doesn't
have to be an easy walkover for one side or the other. Whereas something like "Fifty armed men versus one unarmed schoolchild" is obviously going to be nothing but nasty, brutish, and short, even before you read the first line of the story.
speaker-to-trolls wrote:You guys are being too hard on curbstomp-based fiction, many famous pieces of speculative fiction are based on curbstomping.
In
Frankenstein...
The War of the Worlds...
Star Maker...
1984...
The Day the Earth Stood Still...
Clearly one sided conflicts are a perfectly good way to tell a story
I can only think of one famous, well received work that actually focused on the details of the curbstomp from the perspective of the winners, though.
Which one was that?
This serves my original point:
"Why would I want to watch ludicrously one-sided fights?
The only ones that even faintly amuse me are the ones that serve some philosophical or symbolic point- where the conflict is about how one side can beat the other with the power of an idea, not just by happening to have overwhelmingly superior hardware."
All the stories you describe have a philosophical point- something like "social Darwinism really sucks to be on the receiving end of," or "This is what totalitarianism really looks like under the hood," or "it's a bad idea to blow yourselves up."
(I didn't say it was a difficult point, but in each case there
is a point.)
There's no real point to "Xeelee versus Smurfs" or whatever. The only way I can see it being entertaining is if watching Xeelee poof Smurfs out of existence is
inherently pleasing to you, regardless of artistic quality. I might be wrong about that, there might be a way to make it good, but I doubt it.
And it's pretty clear that the original poster, Earth001, doesn't really care about any other measure of artistic quality. The story doesn't have to be
good; it just has to be a power fantasy in which the reader can watch his chosen proxies effortlessly annihilate something.