Image Transcription: Twitter Post
Kyle Butcavage Jr, @KyleButcavage
COVID has ruined sci-fi movies shit’ll be like, “the year was 3004 and aliens were gonna blow up the sun” and I’m like, “makes sense” but then it goes to “so the world United to…” and I’m like “No the fuck they did not.”
Someone tell them what the ‘fi’ stands for in sci-fi
Just because it’s fiction doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be believable. A good story shouldn’t make you suspend disbelief to the point that it keeps feeling unrealistic, at least within the world that the author created.
If I write a story about an average Joe who goes back in time to the 1700s, people might be able to accept that premise, but then if I write that, because he’s from our time, he knows how to do everything our civilization does, from making and programming a computer to building a jet airplane to landing people on the moon, I think most people would find that too unrealistic to be enjoyable.
Okay I might have written that comment little bit of tongue in cheek just as the op, but regardless we’re talking about whole another level of unbelievably. All major countries teaming up against alien threat? Yeah sure bit of a stretch but maybe. Compare to your example? Completely different story
And yet, to OP’s point, we couldn’t even all agree - or come close to all agreeing - to get vaccinated to stop a virus that was killing millions of people and jamming hospitals.
Isekai has left the chat.
Fidelity?
Science Fidelity?
Hi-fi sci-fi
Hience Fiction Scigh Fidelity
And then they’ll tell you what the sci stands for and keep bitching, and honestly quite rightly so.
It IS a dumb trope that doesn’t reflect realiy, and fiction’s job is to reflect reality, not to break away from it. Not with human reactions and behavior.
If we had a hostile alien invasion, thousands dead in the first wave, footage of the aliens, everything. half the GOP would still be saying it’s a hoax, and making it into an anti Liberal/anti LGBTQ rant. Part of them would straight up worship the aliens, a bunch of them would drink bleach.
Aliens are woke
honestly by the time they get the technology to visit planets so far away they’d probably get pretty woke
The GOP would become the “Human Power Elite” trope in “They Live.” Literally I swear to God that was a metaphor for Tim Scott and Herschel Walker. For that matter MTG and Boebert, too.
I wouldn’t have believed you a few years ago but that pretty much happened.
In the real word: Aliens don’t exist.
On Lemmygrad: The Sun deserves it for defecting to the west!
Nice. I’d have used lemmy.ml as my target, they are a bit angrier over there.
I don’t know… My take is that the stupidity of extremely polarised politics that exists in the US will reach a point where it self destructs within the next 50 years.
In a lot of countries, people listened to the experts. They accepted the lock down. They wore the masks. Almost everyone that didn’t have a medical reason not to, got vaccinated.
If you think only the Americans have highly polarized politics and fucked up during COVID, I have a bridge to sell to you…
I don’t.
That’s why I wrote “in a lot of countries”, and not “in all other countries”. And, even though the former is a subset of the latter, and thus not technically invalidating the premise of your supposition, it’s still a far fetched one.
In a lot of countries they also don’t though. Especially fast developing countries that have first world countries pouring tons of money in like Africa.
Not everyone would unite, but the big governments of the world would at least sit together to form a plan towards a common enemy.
Like how we formed the Allies during WW1.
Your local redneck probably won’t, but that doesn’t matter.
There are so many stories from WW2 about how Americans didn’t unite.
Here’s one of my favorites Patriots complained about air crews painting naked ladies on their planes. They were fine with kids getting drafted and sent overseas, but God Forbid they thought about S*X
Yeah bullshit like that happened. But that bullshit didn’t prevent the allies from accomplishing their objective, did it?
So it proves that bullshit doesn’t prevent things from happening. Though I think magnifying minor bullshit problems to the point where people give up on achieving anything may actually prevent things from happening.
99% of propaganda is getting people upset over minor stuff. Right now the GOP is pushing two ideas at once; that Joe Biden isn’t doing anything about the border AND that stopping Biden’s border bill is a priority. Too mad to think straight is the goal.
Yeah the problem is that the internet has made everyone insanely meta about everything. Let’s prevent Biden from solving this problem so he’ll look bad so we can get rid of the guy that’s trying to solve the problem we want to be solved because he didn’t solve the problem because we stopped him from solving the problem because we want to get rid of him because he didn’t solve the problem.
Talking in circles isn’t just for politicians now. A lot of people have roleplaying on the internet as a press secretary for their favorite politician for so long now I don’t think they even know why they’re doing it, don’t know why they support the politician they are fronting for and don’t know or care about the issues.
The reason for that was because America wasn’t much affected by WW2 before Pearl Harbor.
A threat to the entire planet would include America, even if they like to pretend they are separate from the rest of the world.
thats a good point. I bet for an acute existential threat the major powers would nominally ally themselves against it, while still playing politics. So NATO, Russia, China, India, and whomever else would throw their hat in.
We see that if the threat has a long tail though (climate change) that nobody gives a shit.Neon Genesis Evangelion had this as a sub plot. They could only have 2 or 3 EVA’s ‘battle ready’ at any time in one country depending on when in the series you are. I want to say it was pointless politics but… Yeah, right concerns, wrong application.
I hate that COVID makes the Star Trek utopia so much less likely. We’re living in the mirror universe.
mirror universe.
evil timeline
People on the Enterprise would point and laugh at an alien society that’s stuck in a rut because of Doomerism.
Thinking that cynicism will result in an ideal society is illogical. You can’t control how other people think, you can only control how you think. If everyone is is mired in the cynicism of doomerism, would we be in the ideal Star Trek society?
For us in Germany it went pretty smooth. Kurdish Immigrants developed the first and very potent vaccine, the industry went into overdrive and delivered faster than anyone could have imagined, a well know Immunologist became Minister for Health, we received daily updates, none of the major party tried to downplay anything, when a new chancellor was voted to power he mostly continued the policy of his predecessor and when priority lists for vaccination were given out people simple honoured them. After two years 75% were vaccinated.
And trust me, no one drank bleach. Everyone made fun of the stupid Yankees who did.
Turns out we were the borg all along
Well it only starts improving after next world war.
I mean, even in the StarTrek universe humanity got WAYYYYY worse before it got better.
There must have been an evolutionary change, like predisposition for sociopathy and narcissism and authoritarianism got reduced.
I happen to really like District 9 for this reason
There’s no malicious plot of aliens blowing up shit or invading to colonize: nope, aliens literally just crash-landed on accident and humanity was like “stay the fuck right there, we’ll take all your shit until we figure out how to
deal withexploit you”Humanity is always its own worst-enemy
Also, the future of Elysium (also Bloomkamp) looks more and more likely, with the 1 percent fucking off to a luxury space station in orbit and the rest of humanity living in poverty on the destroyed Earth.
Another interesting thing about Elysium is how the AI is programmed to only recognize rich people as humans. Just like rich people think about it.
I am still hoping for a Halo like future, with civil war in space, war against aliens, the threat of a dark and ancient threat and all of that. Or maybe just a Stellaris future with the same but more megastructures
American perspective.
The only kind that matters. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Not to worry, we had our fair share of COVID nutjobs in the Netherlands as well. Including a whole political party.
Alien invasion is probably the only thing that would make (most) humans band together.
When you have giant spiders trying to eat everyone, people will stop caring that their neighbors leaves blew into their yard, or your skin tone is a few shades darker than someone else’s.
I think you underestimate the level of hatred some people have for various groups or individuals.
Also it’s pretty damned likely that there would be a contingent of people who would insist that we shouldn’t fight back because we have it coming, that fighting will make things worse, that the aliens are working for God, or whatever.
Eight legged freaks?
I haven’t seen that film in years
Aren’t those just irradiated spiders?
Yeah but it makes them giant.
Change “the world united to…” to “The US decided the world would…”
The US couldn’t even get it’s own shit together, let alone make any coherent pronouncements to anyone else
There is no way the “united” states makes it a thousand years (climate change allowing).
Even fiction has its limits
Oxford University wanted to open source it’s vaccine. Bill Gates and his foundation “convinced” them to partner solely with Astrazenica.
One of the iffey feelings I have reading three-body series, even though it’s a pretty dark series that also highlight the dark side of humanity, is that the world superpowers were somewhat effecticely cooperative. May be if Liu Cixin wrote the book around Covid, it might be quite different.
world superpowers were somewhat effecticely cooperative
In that book the ideologies that divided people certainly existed, but they were not geographical.
You could make similar arguments about covid.
Gantz last arc did this so well, people just don’t give a crap about the truth, misinformation is widespread, and people will listen to whatever propaganda they want.
…has ruined sci-fi…
No, just ruined the generic good vs evil trope.
There’s a lot of good sci-fi (books/movies/series) out there that has a more nuanced take on humans and society.
OP desperately needs to read The Expanse. 🤦
You are looking for c/HFY and r/HFY.
But I agree, except for the West pretty much every banana republic tries to isolate itself so their dictators can easier rob their subjects riches.
I summed it up in the Short Story Hard WEST
