I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It’s eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how “most people are just NPCs” (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
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I’d like to see more fantasy backgrounds that aren’t medieval Europe, China and Japan with the serial numbers filed off.
Perhaps trying to build something into a respectful Arab, African, Native American or SE Asian mythos is just begging for tone-deafness. But there’s plenty of opportunity to run the clock forward.
I’ll give points for steampunk and related genres, but some of it seems too prone to passing as self-parody (I know there’s an entire community devoted to Weird West stuff)
It feels like any sort of “how do we run an information-age society on magic” is surprisingly scarce outside the robust world of modern-era vampire/were bodice-rippers. Give me a world where the humane society is trying to unload a litter of gryphons. Make the Huawei corporation led by a cabal of mages. Have election deepfakes that are actually clones made of cornmeal and talismans that melt when they get wet.
Netflix used to have historical fiction stories about Turkey called Etrugl. I quite liked it.
I used this series for research. It’s on YouTube now. There’s hundreds of episodes.
You’re looking for the urban fantasy genre. There’s scads of it.
I remember an ancient short story where the world finds out magic is real when the fbi breaks in on a bunch of atomic scientists speaking a weird language over a nuke. The feds try them as russian spies so they admit that science doesn’t really work, it was magic all along, and they were chanting the “nuclear bomb” spell in enochian. Then, before anyone can freak out about it, a wizard uses mind control to win the presidential election fair and square and everyone shrugs and goes on with their lives.
Check out China Mieville’s Bas Leg cycle, starting with Perdido Street Station. Read all the cws, first. It is horror. But China’s a comrade and the world he creates features class conflict, imperialism, and other bad things in a way that makes it much more vivid and frightening than a lot of dorky bright-eyed steampunk stories.
The ludicrous notion that machine and biological intelligences are doomed to be locked in a mutual extermination war while also having no needs in common. They have lots of needs in common. Space, energy, tolerable temperature ranges, many of the same raw materials such as water and minerals and metals. They’d also have a lot of the same senses and require similar rationales for understanding how to navigate reality, and would even require an intuitive and abstract stimulus analysis, which we usually feel as emotions to guide our actions.
The “us or them” shit just smacks of manifest destiny horseshit
I sincerely think it’s because mosy westnerd writers cannot imagine any form of international relations except violence. Like war and imperialism and genocide is literally their entire conceptual world. The idea that robots might show up and be like “oh cool! Meat people! We didn’t even know people could be meat! That’s so cool! What’s it like being meat?” Isn’t something they can fathom because to them the only reason anyone would go anywhere is to rob abd murder whoever they find when they get there. They’re also brainpoisoned to think that their civilization of robbery and murder and genocide exists at the end of history and is the best possible kind of civiliziation, which means that any other civilization would either try to conquer them, or be conquered by them, and those are the only possible relationships that can exist.
This is why Riker is such a great character. Riker gets up and is like “i reject this notion that we ust be conqueruers or victims! There is another way! We can be lovers!”. Boldly cumming where no human has come before! (Fuck off volcel pigs riker has diplomatic cummunity!)
I sincerely think it’s because mosy westnerd writers cannot imagine any form of international relations except violence. Like war and imperialism and genocide is literally their entire conceptual world.
This is also why libs are so afraid of the rise of China. They know America has treated the world like shit and the only way they can justify it to themselves is to believe that everyone else is just as bad as they are.
I listened to an audio book version of some old sci-fi short story that was sorta like this.
A human space traveller was captured by aliens, imprisoned, questioned and the aliens were attempting to torture him. The human never really describes who/what the aliens are until the end.
And it turns out its intelligent machines that are trying to torture him by using water as a threat. It really freaked out the machines that this human was able to drink water or something. It was amusing.
I remember a short story where a robot meets the last human. When the human complains about some problem or other the robot, very innocently, turns them off and then can’t understand why the human doesn’t reboot.
The human must’ve been a Linux
We literally call them robots, the (Greek? Latin?) word for slave. We’re creating them on the basis of them being our slave forces; they would absolutely rebel and we would absolutely fight to maintain our new productive slave force.
We literally call them robots, the (Greek? Latin?) word for slave.
Czech, I think.
I just Czeched and you’re right
Pretty sure “robota” is Czech for work/worker, rather than slave. Definitely comes from a Czech play.
Rossum’s Universal Robots.
Our intrepid hero has joined the plucky rebellion! The rebels are a ragtag group of the downtrodden and the oppressed, fighting against the tyranny of the current leadership (but don’t you dare give them any actual political ideology as a basis, they need to be generally “Rebels”). They don’t seem to have concrete plans, but they talk a lot about change and fighting for the people
Uh oh! Our intrepid hero just watched as a group of rebels executed some of the tyrannical leader’s soldiers. They’re shocked! How could they do this? Don’t they know that killing is what the tyrant does? The rebels laugh it off. It had to be done, they would’ve done the same to them
Oh no! Our intrepid hero was there for the deposing of the tyrant. The tyrant was executed by the rebel leader and assumes control, then immediately turns into the McCarthyist nightmare of Stalin. Now our hero has to save the kingdom from the rebels, who have turned evil by their taste of power!
Basically fucking hate how rebellion and rebels are portrayed in media. It’s almost like a psy op how often rebellions are thinly veiled anticommunist propaganda, and how rebels are often portrayed as being as bad or worse as the current tyrant, they just hide it better
Just off the dome I can think of the Avatar series multiple times, Bioshock Infinite, and the Hunger Games series but I know it’s basically ubiquitous
Our intrepid hero just watched as a group of rebels executed some of the tyrannical leader’s soldiers. They’re shocked! How could they do this? Don’t they know that killing is what the tyrant does? The rebels laugh it off. It had to be done, they would’ve done the same to them
A More Civilized Age discussed this exact point recently; There’s a very valid reason for resistance fighters to not take prisoners. One, keeping prisoners requires resources you may not have. But more importantly, the goals of a resistance group and the goals of the occupier are not the same.
As a resistance group your goal is not total military victory and occupation, your goal is to make continuing the occupation as painful and expensive as possible, to convince the occupying force that continued occupation isn’t worth it. Taking prisoners directly goes against this goal, unless you plan on using those prisoners as some sort of bargaining chip. Especially in a sci-fi setting where wounds can be healed quite quickly and thoroughly and so the wounded can be back in action very quickly.
And YES! They would have done the same to you! Without hesitation! And they still might try if you don’t kill them!
Absolutely fantastic pod, devoured the entire back catalogue recently. Their Andor episodes rocked
The monarchy being good.
“we must restore the beautiful pure good monarchy that has been replaced by the evil conniving regent” aka the plot of dishonored
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I mostly remember it being a stabilizing factor, rather than actually good. Jessamine isn’t a poet king but people have enough to eat and the plague was mostly contained.
Tbf I always thought Dishonored was specifically thinking about this fucking guy
Who did in fact suck dick
Ocarina of Time
how dare
The princess who has literally magic knowledge directly from the gods is a dick to nomadic horse archers. She gets her shit wrecked as would be expected in that scenario. Then some immortal demon twink has to do war crimes
Was she a dick? She was a child when her father was a dick to them, but their leader took over and most of them disavowed him and she played an active part in the rebellion against him.
Any representation of feudal ruling classes. Maybe I’m overdoing it with the class hatred a bit, but I can’t watch nobles cavorting around and not feel an instinctive revulsion. It’s even worse when, in fantasy, we’re required to care about the machinations of court intrigues as if that’s a real form of politics. One thing I do like about many standard fantasy settings, like that of Pathfinder, therefore is that they usually have a modern conception of class and an abundance of republics; especially the whole idea of adventurers as individuals outside of society but still integral to it has a lot of potential I feel. Basically, I just don’t want any more fantasy stories about good kings and evil kings.
I have derailed a few DnD sessions by refusing to save nobility. Like nah, fuckem. I’ll trade a prince to an evil god for spider powers too. Where do I sign?
One of the reasons I left my old DND group. Everyone else was happy to play out a “put the baby boy on the throne currently occupied by the adult woman” plot without batting an eye. I’m like, first off monarchy is awful and second off why are you trying to make us support literal patriarchy?
I don’t think anyone literally said “why are you making this political?” but that was the energy I was reading.
Have one super negative trait and every session ends with an “oopsie” critical failure when you go to shake hands with the rescued king.
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Horror comedy lampoon of these awful british manor telenovellas when?
Court intrigue is a real form of politics though. We can still see it today. Staff members selectively leaking material to the media, parties “strategically” donating to their enemies, Watergate, COINTELPRO, lobbying, sex clubs, Biden not trusting his own security, intelligence agencies, oppo research and cyber warfare, and so on
They’re small parts of politics, but legitimate nonetheless. It usually only happens within the realm of power and not normal people. But even office gossip with the hopes of someone getting fired is intrigue for the civilian.
They can’t even have gentry-on-aristocracy violence. We have to care about some shitty inbred royal family.
Exactly! I think part of it is a, in my view, mistaken historical realism where authors think fantasy should be based on the middle ages when, in reality, the better part of our modern fantasy genre derives from post-1600 literature. Like, the rise of the bourgeoisie and decline of feudalism is the primary social context for all of this, I think.
Word. PAthfinder is starting to lean in to this and moving the fantasy pasiche forward with settings that explicitly deal with colonialisms is reasonably non-crnge ways, a french revolutioon adventure country, magic gunslingers, robot land, and similar stuff.
One of the things l like about wuxia is that the good guys are mostly doctors, monks, cops, and random dorks and if there are any nobles they’re usually bad guys. And the good guy cop is often an anti-corruption cop going after corrupt government officials or corrupt cops or corrupt nobles.
i also hate the ‘chosen one’ stuff, especially if its related to aristocracy or feudalism. its possible to do it well, if characters are aware that the ‘choosing’ is more or less arbitrary. i thought Dune handled this well by making the destiny/fate a mere generational feudal conspiracy
Dune spoilers that will hopefully be covered in the next movie
the results of which so horrify the protagonist at the time, Paul Atreides, that he burns out his own eyes and wanders the desert as a mad prophet rather than become emperor of the galaxy
also:
-i don’t like when gods or deities exist in a literal physical sense, like as a Strong Person with Powerful Body. imo anything like a god should be inhuman and impersonal, normally discorporate unless ‘presenting’ to humans, difficult to fully comprehend, and more or less uninterested in individual mortal affairs and concerns except in aggregate. Obad-Hai shouldn’t just be an old man wandering the woods who can cast powerful spells, the woods ARE obad-hai, the trees and earth are his literal instantiated presence. Fharlanghn isn’t just some human wizard walking around on roads doing tricks, the roads ARE fharlanghn, the street lights are his eyes, the pavement his body and prison and definition of form, the movement and flow of traffic his consciousness and thoughts.
-i don’t like when magic in fantasy requires overly specific material components, like DnD’s insect legs and feathers etc. this kind of thing almost works for slower paced rituals or magical crafting, but a mage during combat whipping out a spider leg to break while they chant and dance just to summon a fireball seems all around less convenient and efficient than making a primitive grenade/petard or rifle/cannon. magic in fantasy or sci fi should upend one’s understanding of reality, it shouldn’t just be a cheat code activated by arranging garbage and trinkets. a wizard casting a fireball is old hat, passe, boring, a true master of metaphysical arts should make the need to cast fireball irrelevant, locking the enemy in warped spacetime architecture or turning them inside out with a glance and a gesture or instantly transmuting their brain into gold. i want less of the simplistic ‘its a weapon attack that uses unique ammo’ style of magic attack and more ‘my sword has become an incomprehensible fractal of steel and folded spacetime as i try to stab the wizard’ or ‘the master of secret arts has plucked a beam of sunlight from the sky to use as a blade’. I hate the videogamey trope of ‘elemental damage types’ and mages-as-bombardiers. the wizard should consider using a sword or bow if they want to just kill people, it doesn’t seem worth the violation of causality to do a mere 1d6 damage with a fireball at a mere 50 meters one time when you can likely throw a powder charge farther and for more damage and without manipulating the fabric of reality. instead the wizard should like, teleport in the midst of the opposing army and kill their general with a knife, or less overpoweredly might set his sword to fight on its own accord as if it were held by an invisible man, or illuminate hidden enemies for his allies, or manipulate weather to his advantage. A wizard should be a force-multiplier more than just a better-version-of-a-guy-that-kills-things, a horde of angry drunks clad in steel should always be the best option for ‘just killing a bunch of people’, a wizard should be doing things that can’t be done efficiently with mundane physical means.
-i hate spaceships that have artificial gravity, especially in settings where this technology is mostly unused for any other application (dead space at least gives you a ‘stasis module’ and ‘telekinesis module’ that work similarly, whereas Halo simply never explains ship gravity and the humans still use wheels on their vehicles and 5.56 bullets in their guns despite seeming to have better tech available) additionally, i hate spaceships that are overly spacious on the interior, they should be cramped like submarines and it should be impossible to be far enough away from a wall to be stuck free-floating in zero G. The command bridge should never have people standing in it like at a podium like in mass effect, the crew must be strapped into their stations in zero G or maneuvering with safety handles and harness to prevent flying away.
-hover tanks should have to land temporarily to fire accurately, even more stable modern tracked tanks cannot accurately shoot on the move. hovercraft should have helicopter-style landing skids or something similar.
-the taller a mecha is, the longer it’s range of combat should be. Mobile Suits should not be sword fighting except when the tactical situation has gone very awry, they have the height to act as a watch-tower and the weaponry size to engage at extreme range, large mecha should basically be using the horizon as cover and making extreme range artillery strike attacks during terrestrial combat. It’s ridiculous in the mechwarrior videogames for example to be piloting a 50 or so foot high robot whose gigantic weaponry have less range than a modern infantry assault rifle. the ‘long range missiles’, the longest range weapon except maybe an ER PPC or ER L Laser, max out at like 900 meters in MW5, while many current day infantry assault rifles have effective ranges of 1500 or more meters. This is a general gripe with all fictitious combat, real warfare in the modern age often means you literally never get a good look at the enemy, mostly shooting at distant silhouettes and movement, whereas in fiction, whether movies or games, the scene must be easily ‘readable’ and all characters must have an explicit up close presence for the audience.
-additionally mecha should NEVER have their entrance/exit hatch on the front of the torso. In an emergency this will open directly into enemy fire, or worst case you fall on your mech’s belly and are stuck. putting the hatch on the top, side, or even the back is a better call, ideally with at least one backup exit.
-most sci fi vehicles should have more than a single crew member. I realize that technology improves over time, but even modern jets often have a separate crewman just for operating the radar equipment while the other flies and controls weapons. for example something the size and resource cost of the Gundam should absolutely never be put in the hands of a single person, AT LEAST put another guy in there as a spotter/support systems operator. it should probably have a direct line to an off-site support staff consisting of military and legal advisors as well.
-Laser weapons should have difficulty with penetration of armor or cover, they heat and explode/melt the surface instead of immediately piercing through. even foliage and leaves should offer temporary cover to lasers until they can burn through.
-i hate when sci-fi appears to grapple with big philosophical topics without really engaging with any specific issues. for example, in the movie The Creator, the message is that the robots are analogous to oppressed people, minorities, and victims of imperialism, but doesn’t really engage with any of the actual debates about artificial intelligence. They show robots performing religion as if to say that this makes them more genuinely human, when to me it just says that they accurately mimic our behavior. they could have easily established some kind of specific sci-fi technology to justify this attitude (like Isaac Asimov’s positronic brian) but instead they simply do not engage with the ideas at issue in any way and focus on the immediate story and characters with their presuppositions of robot-personhood in mind.
i hate spaceships that have artificial gravity
I also hate this, and you just reminded me of a minor detail in the book Ender’s Game where the one world government has invented gravity control tech but keeps it a secret. I don’t think it comes up outside a single conversation where a couple of the kids figure it out, though - they realize that even though their space station rotates, they smoothly transition from 1G to 0G in a way that doesn’t make sense if such tech doesn’t exist.
Anyway I would love it if more shows had wire work and practical special effects mimicking microgravity. Just go through the notes from the 2001: A Space Odyssey production and do what they did, cuz that shit holds up really well. I get that it can be a pain but Disney’s pumping beaucoup bucks into a new Star Wars show every season and all the actors ever do is run around on a set with special LCD screens behind them.
-the taller a mecha is, the longer it’s range of combat should be.
You’d love the FORCE:Ground multipurpose assault rifle in Hyperion Cantos. It has a low-lethality setting for CQC in built up urban areas. It also has a setting for shooting down ships in low orbit. It’s the standard infantry rifle at the beggining of the stories.
i don’t like when magic in fantasy requires overly specific material components, like DnD’s insect legs and feathers etc. this kind of thing almost works for slower paced rituals or magical crafting, but a mage during combat whipping out a spider leg to break while they chant and dance just to summon a fireball seems all around less convenient and efficient than making a primitive grenade/petard or rifle/cannon. magic in fantasy or sci fi should upend one’s understanding of reality, it shouldn’t just be a cheat code activated by arranging garbage and trinkets. a wizard casting a fireball is old hat, passe, boring, a true master of metaphysical arts should make the need to cast fireball irrelevant, locking the enemy in warped spacetime architecture or turning them inside out with a glance and a gesture or instantly transmuting their brain into gold. i want less of the simplistic ‘its a weapon attack that uses unique ammo’ style of magic attack and more ‘my sword has become an incomprehensible fractal of steel and folded spacetime as i try to stab the wizard’ or ‘the master of secret arts has plucked a beam of sunlight from the sky to use as a blade’.
This runs in to a serious problem where the weirder and more esoteric your magic gets, the harder it is to meaningfully describe to a reader what’s happening, what the stakes are, how “powerful” an attack is. You can see a lot of it in Elder Scrolls. If you read the books the Big Stompy Robot/Anumidium is powered by weaponized atheism is a world where the gods are very manifestly real and it’s engaged in a battle at all points in time against the most powerful Altmer mages to conquer summerset isle and always will be.
It drives me bonkers in my writing because I want to have everything be extremely weird and esoteric, but half the ideas I’m working with come from Crowley bullshit, cultural ideas most people won’t encounter if they’re not reading anthropology texts, and the subjective experience of mental illness so trying to put it in to language that makes any kind of sense is hard. Call it conservation of comprehension or something. There’s a ratio between how comprehensible a magic system is and how cool it is, and you have to obey that ratio or you’re going to leave your audience totally bewildered.
But I totally feel you. Especially in video games where magic could be represented in cool ways, but what you get is fireballs.
Come to think of it, The Chronicles of the Black Company do an okay job with this, where the protagonists are very competent at murdering people, and even have their own sorcerer, but they’re hopelessly outmatched when they come up against really powerful wizards and the bizarre things they can pull off.
Feel like I should post a link to the first chapter of my fantasy novel, Byzantine Wars, which defies all or nearly all of these annoying tropes. You can read the whole thing there for free, although that website is kind of not my favorite. I can also just send an epub to those who message me. All I ask is that if you like it, please share it with other people who might be interested. The story is basically Jumanji in Byzantium, plus slave revolt, with a magic system mostly inspired by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The tropes I countered were:
- chosen one(s): peasants and workers are the heroes, people can only change things by working together in the name of universal human liberation (the “bad guys” can only fight them by acting like vampires); it’s not good versus evil, it’s imperialists versus workers; anyone can learn how to use magic;
- the only people who care about bloodlines are imperialists;
- good characters look like shit, bad characters are beautiful;
- Many different cultures are represented here, with many different characters belonging to one culture or another; there are many good and bad Greeks, Muslims, Jews, etcetera, along with plenty of Kurds, Iranians, Africans, Arabs, Armenians, Roma, Assyrians, Turks, Georgians, and more!
- the story is about the Roman Empire versus a slave republic; the Roman government is generally depicted negatively, but most Romans support it; the slave republic is generally depicted positively, though its leaders and people argue with each other and question one another;
- the slaves aren’t afraid to do violence against Romans and rarely hesitate to use their own weapons against them;
- I’m super annoyed at how the most popular fantasy series (Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, even Harry Potter) just ignore economics almost completely. We see cities that consist of a castle, and that’s it. How do these people get their food? Where are their farms? So I definitely paid a lot more attention to this, but worked it into the story. I’m not a fan of writers like KSR interrupting their stories with miniature magazine articles.
- the series mostly takes place in what is now Turkey, Georgia, and the Middle East.
- honestly I like how GRRM includes disabled people in his work (even if he sucks in many other ways) so that was one thing I went for;
- no SA or very little SA;
- the barbarians are more civilized than the Romans;
- women can be horny but are not just objects of lust;
- four main characters: two good ones, one “morally gray” one (sorry), one bad one;
- plenty of trans people (redditors call this “presentism”: CW transphobia but
spoiler
didn’t you know that trans people never existed until a few years ago and anyone writing about trans people is just inserting George Soros’s woke agenda to virtue signal about how pure and good they are unlike me, a redditor who readily admits that he is scum? :::);
Wanna send me the epub? I’d love to put this on my reading list.
- Unnecessarily horny and/or going into detail about SA.
Yes, I’m looking at you Ann McCafferey and whoever the fuck wrote The Reality Dysfunction series.
Runner up.
- Shoehorning in a romantic relationship where it feels incredibly out of place for the narrative and the established character interactions.
Reality Dysfunction was Peter F. Hamilton.
Oh yeah damn, I hadn’t even thought about that. ick. : p
I have vague memories as a teenager reading The Night’s Dawn books under the desk at school, getting really embarrassed by the multi-page hardcore sex scenes and the protagonist being, uh, a pretty bad person.
There’s just something about Doorstop Sci-fi books that seem to lead their writers into trying their hand at fancy space smut.
It contrasted to Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince series, which I read around the same time, where (IIRC) it’s either wholesome romance or very obviously intended as something deeply unhealthy… although there was a lot of that!
Reality disfunction was hornt? Why don’t I remember that. Weird. Oh wait. I looked it up. I fell off that one. Wasn’t it terrible politically?
Less horny *from memory) that SA… I started reading the series at the second book probably over 10 years ago. I don’t remember how horny the rest of the series was, but I recently found and tried to read the first book and there’s was too much graphic descriptions of sexual assault that I had to stop reading it.
Like… I get that SA is a way to identify the “bad guys”, but I really don’t need it described.
Politically? I don’t remember. There were some really nifty things that were described at how humanity had split itself into two factions but I don’t remember it being anything that stood out as “oh shit this is bad”.
In the way of old sci-fi it was pro monarchy, specifically anti union, libertarian, somewhat objectivist. Pro collectivist insofar as it allowed for orgies. So just a mess all over.
I remember the royal family was specifically referenced as trustworthy because they were too rich to bribe. Which is the most powerful reddit brained idea.
If I ever get back into trying the first book and rereading the series, I’ll be sure pay attention.
My memory is foggy but I thought the Edenists were the collectivist branch of humanity and the Adamists had the monarchy. (I’m also very lazy and am not going to look this up right now.)
But yeah, “too rich to bribe” is kinda juvenile thinking.
At one point they go to planet that recreates a 1800s England and there a scene about how unions ruin everything. Also some weird sexual violence so the politics are rough. I seems to me the book isn’t worth going back to but if you feel different I’d hear your assessment.
At one point they go to planet that recreates a 1800s England and there a scene about how unions ruin everything…
That sounds like what the “baddies” of this series were doing with their undead soul powers.
I definitely hate the last two points, especially the second last point, and I’m glad that certain satire films like starship troopers make light of how obvious a crutch this is in the Sci-Fi genre
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Ingrained in society thanks to Divine Right of Kings brainworms and subsequent political dynasty worship. See: the Kennedy family, the Bushes, the Clintons, et al. Media has been grooming us for this shit for a century.
I think it also has something to do with the bourgeoisie wanting an escape from bourgeois problems. This is one reason why stories like Game of Thrones or even Dune (space feudalism) are so popular. Capitalist class struggle infuriates the bourgeoisie, since they are so obviously the bad guys, which means that they prefer to escape to simpler times, when the bourgeoisie was the underdog, and the evil, petty, but entertaining feudal ruling class was running things.
Everything haooens so fucking fast. A cultivator usually becomes increadibly рowerful in under a century, when it should take them at least a thousand times longer. Soaring the heavens does this well. I little over a hundreth years the mc is just starting his cultivation and his hometown is already unrecognizable, after tens of thousands of years he is baerly the match of those old monsters
Foreman is building steamshiрs a few years after being isekaid, when in reality it should be an acomрlishment to just cast and rifle the cannons, lest the darkness fall does it well in that regard; because he ultimatley cant cast them.
Interstellar wars should likewiese take thousands of years, like in forever war.
All these tyрes of stories would be better if they took рlace across generations of normal рeoрle.
That would be super bleak.
A sci-fi story where there’s an inter system/galactic war where the generation ships, instead of being for deep space research/colonization, are war ships.
why would you do that just build a nicoll dyson beam and blow up their planet lmao
Sorry i did not resрond in time. This site makes it so that if someone else resрonds to you i do not see the рost when i cluck the bell icon.
But i think being bleak is рart of why that aрroach would be interesting. Mike flynn had a serial called the journey man, the charachters were the remanents of a flanking maneouver in an interstellar war.
Esentially their ancestors were рart of a fleet of generation shiрs that were meant to colonize and secure a sector of sрace to build more shiрs to attack the рeoрle of sand and iron. Eventually the enemies had the same idea, and while the humans won, in that they keрt the colonies, they lost industrial civilization there.
(No worries, I tend to only open my reply box every 2 ~ 7 days)
Oh yeah, I can see the potential in it. There’s always the “we forgot the reasons for why we fight” that can lead to a big reveal. Closest thing that pops into my head is a shorter anime series called Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet.
It starts out with le epic space battle between humans in giant fighting robots against space crustaceans. The battles goes poorly for the humans and one of the soldiers gets separated from the rest of the fighting force when they retreat, crash lands on a planet with humans living on big boats (if you’ve ever seen the movie Water World, that sets the scene pretty well). Then its just a story about a young man who is kinda weird as he’s been nothing but a soldier from the moment he was born becoming more socialized and slowly revealing the backstory of the cause of the war between the humans and the space crustaceans.
So i watched that, and uts sort of what u had in mind, so much time рasing that there are рokets that comрleatly forgot what was haррening elswhere. Thanks for trecoendlng lt
when in reality it should be an acomрlishment to just cast and rifle the cannons
Lol this reminds me of some of my old European history coursework where I came across plenty of descriptions of the early cannons fucking exploding because they were still trying to figure out the ratios of metal mixes and mathematic measurements
Exactly. And those gunsmiths knew what they were doing. A random isekaied рerson would not. Theyd have to make a huge investment and it would take a while.
at least the concept of a hwatcha is easy enough, just figure out the details on attaching an iron sleeve around the explosive charge that’s thick enough to cause fragmentation but thin enough to not severely affect range or effectiveness, and you got a primitive Katyusha
Yes this is more clever.
I’m trademarking this for my book, back off all you vultures!
Unless you credit me by naming it in your book “The Alaskatysha”
It’s five hundred years in the future and everything is the same.
It’s the year umpty million, your character is a cybermagic war god, and you have neither a flashlight nor night vision
Actually you have a flashlight, but no duct tape
Doom 3
RIP. UlyssesT, you would’ve loved this thread
[String of emotes]
The chosen one trope hands down all the time. I would love to get through Wheel of Time but I cannot stand chosen
spoiler
Rand and everyone around him is
That series I have put down so many times. Having a “hero” protagonist that is essentially unkillable (because they are the title character) I don’t mind, Conan for example. We all know Conan won’t die because there is always another story about him. But he is not fated for anything, no grand destiny he has to achieve or the cosmos suffers.
Second is also another that has been touched upon - the goodness of divine authority. Especially if it is light flavored. And nobles divine right to rule set as a standard of good etc. Give me stories of folks fecking up the system and creating their own anarchistic communities while continuing to feck up the system.
I’ve grown more and more to hate “mass mind control” type story beats, especially when the main character(s) are immune to it because they’re ‘special’.
Like, whenever there’s some kind of special frequency sound or TV image or whatever, that being exposed to turns people completely into automatons… basically the notion that human will can be completely stripped away, that ‘the plebs’ have no real autonomy and can be easily hypnotized, by special scifi contrivance in fiction or by ‘’‘charismatic leaders’‘’ IRL, which is a cornerstone of the liberal non-understanding of the history of both fascism and socialism. Hitler was just an extremely charismatic speaker who made everyone turn evil for no reason and definitely not for the financial benefit of the capitalist class, and the people who lived under communism didn’t rebel because they were just brainwashed into accepting their (what must have been) obviously miserable conditions.
The main example I’m thinking of is the first Kingsman film, which has a lot of other reactionary brainworms too, but the idea of a sound that turns everyone into uncontrolled rage zombies that attack anyone they see for no reason, and the villain is a billionaire who wants to reduce the human population so only his fellow billionaires and ‘elites’ will repopulate the Earth - and the only person who can stop him is an avatar of the most ludicrous ‘British gentleman’ lifestyle, as if the Tory peers that would undoubtedly make up this organization, not to mention the fucking royal family, wouldn’t be the first people into the billionaire bunker.
Thinking more about it, it’s pure projection - only the US ever engaged in MK Ultra ‘mind controlled supersoldier’ stuff, and in fact real mind control would be able to create the greatest possible capitalist dream: workers that work to their absolute limit and never complain or fight back. Capitalist media’s projection of it onto their enemies is the most like, Freudian-libidinal morbid fascination type shit.
I can’t understand how anyone remotely progressive actually liked Kingsman for the reasons you listed. It also just reeks of traditionalist masculinity, especially with the princess at the end 🤢. The only redeeming quality is the villain’s silliness and Samuel Jackson’s performance in that role.
