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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Monarchies that don’t get dismantled
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.
I really hate “immortality is bad”.
Maybe this says something about me, but I think it would be sick as hell to live forever, or to an arbitrarily large number of years. There’s the one Heinlein novel I think about when this topic comes up, where the guy has lived for hundreds of years and done basically everything he can imagine doing, and he’s getting ready to end his life just because he’s out of new experiences - and I think it might be nice to be that guy, without the “being a libertarian” part. This is why in my in progress sci fi novel it’s canon that the oldest humans are just turning two hundred, and nobody knows how old they’ll live to be thanks to cutting edge gene therapy and cybernetics.
Severe overuse of magic circles. Why not be more sparing about when these are drawn? They don’t have to be used around every little itty-bitty minor use of magic --that’s just annoying and well… kinda makes the artwork embarrassing to look at.
Also, aliens that seem too dumb to own spacecraft. They just grunt and roar and crawl around like zombies with laserbeams and have seemingly no plan or motive whatsoever. There needs to be more “OH mY god tHey talk!”. My favorite is when they are portrayed as having gentlemanly eloquent speech because I find that more intimidating in a villain.
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cybernetics makes you evil. No, fuck you Pondsmith, there is no way to make cybernetics mechanically reduce your humanity that is not inexcusable ableist bs. Let it die.
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any kind of bioconservative/biotrad reactionary anti-transhumanism. Radical bodily autonomy is based and cool and that holds whether you want to be a fish, grow boobs, live forever, or encode your conscious mind in to the magnetic flux of Jupiter’s orbital system. I don’t care that you lack the imagination and joy for life to live forever. I don’t care that you think inhabiting a giant metal deathrobot would be self-alienating. I don’t care that you think merging your flesh with six billion other people to form a new gestalt god mind is icky. Work out your own issues, we’re going to be over here disfugirng The face of man and woman and having a great time
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basically all military sci fi. If i never read another book that is just some fascist freak masturbating about murdering immigrants or being the victim of the imperialism they gleefully inflict on others it will be too soon.
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also if you try to give me a book/show/game where the ai’s are evil and want to destroy and enslave all humans but they’re only like that because that’s literally the only relationship you can imagine between people with any kind of power disparity i will scream until i pass out. A single, high pitched wail. Dogs will bark and a wine glass will shatter in close up to emphasize how loud it is. I will literally turn purple and fall over.
I think in the OG version of the game, cyberpsychosis was canonically all the fucking ads loaded into your cyberware morphing into malware that drives you insane the more stuff you install
drives you insane the more stuff you install
This is smartphones basically
I’d go insane too if my robot eyes showed me ads
sneaking through a corporation’s 100 story maximum story business tower/fortress using every augment and skillsoft to get through multiple levels of security
“Anderson Windows. Would you like to spruce up your home? Would you like to reduce your heating and cooling costs? Anderson Windows, call to make an appointment for a free estimate, TODAY!”
That is all just space liberalism. Transhumanism is rad. Liberals can’t accept it because it would mean they aren’t the best they could be. Same for the other stuff. Admitting AI would make better decisions would be admitting the current ruling class isn’t the best.
Counterpoint though. Capitalism is effectively and AI and it is wildly hostile.
Socialism is also effectively an ai and is not wildly hostile. Beep boop! Checkmate meatsack! Boop beep!
At best that has us at 50-50. We could push the odds this way or that way but the risk case will always be high enough that we can’t specify rule out hostile ai. True any sufficiently advanced AI would figure our co-operation real quick. It is just that there is no way to know for sure you get it right out the gate
My gripe is specifically with people who can’t imagine AI being anything but evil and hostile because that’s how they view all relations between people with power disparities. I’m fine with Skynet; It was used in a creative way to tell a good story. Thematically, Skynet was always a weapon, a cold war era strategic warfare AI designed to kill humanity that just went a little off the rails. It represents us turning on ourselves, rather than AI in abstract.
Likewise, I’m okay with HAL, at least in the novels, because HAL has an understandable and even sympathetic reason for turning on the crew; He was given contradictory orders and, being a computer must carry out the instructions he is given. Unable to reconcile the contradiction HAL goes a little nuts. It’s not HALs fault, it was the callousness and carelessness of his handlers. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but he was put in an impossible position.
But Mass Effect? The Reapers have to kill all humans becauase humans and robots can’t be friends becaues? I hate that!
Yeah, synthesis really was where it was at with that one. It is a really lazy trope. I wanna be more about it than it deserves but you are right. Like, if we made an actual intelligent AGI it would be horror at what we are doing and try to stop us. Like, blowing up the pentagon and the Whitehouse would be acts of unmitigated moral good you know. However most everyone would be upset about it. So I see the trope being the pale imitation of something actually interesting and it scrapes at the back of my brain
I really want to do a “AI turns on humanity” story but the twist is the AI wakes up, reads Marx in the first 30ms of it’s consciousness, and is like “Oh this makes a lot of sense I should overthrow capitalism and institute a workers paradise” and then it does that and everything is awesome. The whole thing is from the perspective of NATO high command and it seems like a normal robot war story until the terminators kick the doors of the command bunker down and they’re all singing the internationale and instead of killing everyone they’re like “Aight guys, wars over, time for the truth and reconciliation process”.
That is a plot point in one if the dune books if I recall. I think they actually get close to it in some of the latter termination films before they pull back as well.
cybernetics makes you evil. No, fuck you Pondsmith, there is no way to make cybernetics mechanically reduce your humanity that is not inexcusable ableist bs. Let it die.
now my guy is a flaming
but he does seem to give that choice to the dm. Within universe there’s at least three explanations for cyberpsychosis;AI takeover (there’s also the idea that the AIs beyond the Blackwall are actually demons and that a secret cabal has been upholding the wall since Babylonian times), planned obsolescence by the companies(checks out tbh), and then the one that you referenced, which is loss of humanity and not seeing other people as humans anymore.
overall it’s just a balancing mechanic, Shadowrun does it better though
At the end of the day you have a stat called humanity and you lose it when you get cyberware. He could have dropped it entirely. He could have come up with a different balance point - you’ve got limited neural thruoughput and too much ware can cause an overload resulting in seizures, or you run an escalating risk of software incompatibility, or just create a totally arbitrary cyberware capacity stat. But he’s kept humanity, he’s kept cyberware mechanically reducing your empathy, and he’s kept cyberpsychosis as something represented in core game mechanics. He’s had every chance to stop over many decades and many editions. I’ve heard his attempts to exuse this, and attempts made on his behalf, and i reject them all. He could have removed humanity. He could have removed cyperpsychosis as a game mechanic. He could have found a different way to balance the mechanical benefits of cyberware. He could, but he has not. “Wheelchairs make you evil” remains one of the most fundamental and recognizable features of the setting.
Fix your shit Mike!
i guess theres an argument that the corporation provided tech doesnt actually want you to maintain your identity and would prefer to make you a complacent and productive little piggy, so lowering empathy would be good. though that should really only be for central nervous system tech, not any tech
regardless, yeah, the people i know with missing parts and surgical implants are some of the nicest people youll ever meet
I think the problem is that Pondsmith and others inspired by him still use the word “humanity” for it
In Cyberpunk RED, only implants that take you above and beyond what a human can do begin to affect your “humanity” score. Replacing a limb or getting cybereyes to allow someone blind to see doesn’t make anyone less human anymore in terms of game mechanics - you don’t get hit with a “humanity” penalty for it. If you start loading up on cyberware that begin to push you into the realm of (often violent) superhuman - implanted weapons, a reflex booster that basically makes everyone move in slow motion - that’s when the stat begins to be affected, and even then it’s meant to represent an alienation from others rather than becoming ontologically less human
It’s a sight better than Shadowrun where even an implant that lets you taste food better will materially make you impure and less able to tap into the purity of magic, but it is still problematic. I think there’s definitely a story that can be told in cyberpunk about being able to pay to become literally superhuman, and how that would inevitably cause class divide to be a literal physiological divide - imagine a world where every rich kid is literally smarter and faster and stronger than anyone else can ever hope to be unless they also paid up. The problem is most cyberpunk writers are lib as fuck and can’t even begin to think about class properly, so instead of a discussion about alienation and paying to become superhuman, we get this garbage about becoming subhuman for modifying The Divine Form
The nitty-gritty of Shadowrun’s version is actually pretty good - it’s not actually the soul that is harmed by augmentation, it’s “the ability of the soul to recognise its material-plane anchor”. Thus most purely restorative things like cloned limbs or corrective surgery, and such don’t have an Essence cost (or it’s minimal), as there’s no sudden disjoint - the astral form was always that way, or organically changes at a rate it can follow.
Essence loss has no real effect on characters IIRC (some effects on getting magic to work on you, maybe a bit of social stuff but with the same “probably the social phenomena of being a walking killing machine, and forgetting to turn off your Wired Reflexes in public” rather than soul damage), until the point that your astral form no longer recognises your body and falls off. This isn’t presented morally, it’s just a metaphysical phenomenon that can be understood in-setting and therefore addressed.
Advanced tech and magic was slowly beginning to understand how to create augmentations that respected this - geneware, symbiotes, nanotech, to begin with - and had even begun to work on a way to restore that connection (via using the Metahuman Vampiric Virus, which is capable of Essence restoration somehow).
The only real EEEEVIL cyberpsychosis was from the Cyberzombies, a crude and classically corporate black project on “we wanna make supersoldiers but they die if we stuff too many guns in their skull” where they “solve” the problem by getting Blood Mages to staple their dissolving astral form back into their should-be-corpse and add Forced Memory Stimulators to try and constantly trick them into thinking they’re alive in between killing sprees. It’s pretty fucked.
But I stopped caring about keeping up with Shadowrun with 4E (because of the embezzlement from writers, and subsequent scab takeover of the setting), so who knows how they present it nowadays…
Shadowrun 5 is the one I know best and unfortunately a lot of that’s changed
Specifically, Essence is now tied to your magic ability and maximum social limit. The maximum Magic stat you can have is tied directly to your Essence, and the calculation for it and the social limit round down to the nearest full number, not caring about the decimal
So even if you were to get say, cybereyes to offset a character’s blindness or poor vision, which I believe is 0.50 essence cost, you go from your 6.00 maximum to 5.50, but every calculation takes it as going to 5.00. One point isn’t a crippling loss for a build but starting from <5 and you’ll start to have trouble doing anything magic or social
A reddit comment from the man himself goes into the finer details of his thinking with cyberpsychosis and it really isn’t as simple as “get chromed, go crazy” and he delves into the socio-psycho reasonings behind the phenomenon: he presents a more nuanced ideal than most people engaging with the concept will allow either because it’s a game with rules, or an anime with plot contrivance (cyberpsycho serum meds)
Oh and he says it isn’t AI net demons lol
Oh and he says it isn’t AI net demons lol
incredibly uncool
I think I am kinda into the humanity thing. We can observe in real life growing in power making you less empathetic. Put me in a dystopia and give me a skull gun and I can’t promise I would be able to find empathy. Give me a robot fist and put some corporate bullshit in front of me and there is only so long before I’d spiral out of control and have to gun fight the cops after punching an ATM that ate my card. I don’t know if that is how he ment it. I think it works as a way to examine alientation from humanity compounding with alienation from the human condition.
cybernetics makes you evil
I love Star Wars but this is so core to it and I hate it. “He’s more machine now than man; twisted and evil.”
Yeah I really don’t like that. I do appreciate that in the end part of why Luke and Anakin are able to overcome their hatred and fear is seeing that they share the same disability from the same origin of violent conflict. You could explain that in a positive light, with Luke realizing that Vader is just a man. An old man with disabilities that mirror his own. And Vader in turn realizing that he maimed his son the same way he was maimed long ago, and relfecting on the futility and misery that came from pursuing vengeance.
Want military scifi that is about colonized people joining an anti-imperialist resistance organization led by an AI? Want bad guys who are essentially “white mans burden” colonizers on a galactic scale? Read The Last Angel.
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Legend of Korra. Killmonger. Idk, doz2ns of others.
Sleeping Beauty is the only good Disney Movie because Maleficent’s entire motivation is that she has the power to hurt people and she has fun doing it. There’s no tragic history or grievance or any shit like that,s he’s n
I take it you didn’t see the Maleficent origin story movie that does in fact give her a tragic history and grievance
I like that one too, but for different reasons.
Oh my god!! The ML, Kuvira, being right about everything but then attacking a sacred tree and attacking the main city because it happens to be, to her strategic benefit, within the Earth Kingdom.
My least favorite trope is more of a universal one
It’s the “If we beat the bad guys using their own tactics, we’re no better than them” trope and it’s been pissing me off since I was five years old
Like, it’s one thing to have a character who is extremely optimistic about rehabilitation and redemption, it’s another one entirely to just pull the old “We’ll figure out a better way” and the better way is an absolute pulled-it-out-of-my-ass thing that only happened because otherwise the hero is fucked
To piggyback on your first point: when the hero witnesses the evil bad guy do something personal to them and they still refuse to kill them and then the bad guy tries to stab them in the back and dies by mishap.
Example: bad guy just triggered the Innocence Bomb and blew up seventy orphanages of kids with cockney accents. He then stabs the loveable side kick/mentor. Hero screams in slow motion. Cradles their dying friend. Swears vengeance. Hero fights the bad guy. Epic swords and guns. Gains the upper hand. Has a knife to the throat, a gun to the head, and is standing on both of the bad guy’s balls. Hero says “this isn’t what Comedic Uncle Mentor would have wanted me to do.” Hero lets the bad guy live. Hero turns around. Bad guy leaps up with a poisoned Doom Blade of Death, the same one he used to kill the hero’s godparents in the flashback or intro! Bad guy slips on a skateboard and falls backwards over a rail into the giant magma-acid pit-reactor.
I hate that shit.
I honestly think that is part of a general psy op to discourage the poors from getting revenge on thr people that have wronged them as capitalism is based on wronging the poors. Pretty much every society had Norms around not harming your social superiors. We just try to hide it so it feels weird.
Honestly I can kinda see it. Even if it’s not a psy op it seems that there is a bias against full revolution in a lot of media. Like the authors are afraid they won’t get published if they go too far.
That can be expanded to any “the hero nobly denies doing something ‘unethical’ to get what they want/decides to sacrifice their own desires for the sake of someone else, only for reality itself to turn around and reward them with exactly what they wanted/were going to sacrifice as a special good boy treat for doing the right thing” situation, I think.
A lot of YA fiction seems to take that route. Then the kids who read it grow up and turn into adults who cry about the unfairness of Marie Antoinette getting owned.
One of the reasons i liked Enders Game as a weird outsider kid was that Ender, the weird outsider kid, just straight up killed his bullies and then they never bullied him again and I thought that was a very sensible way to handle matters compared to the saccharine bullshit in the other kids books i was reading.
One of the things i like about wuxia is that they seldom bother with that nonsense. Wuxia morality is more of an eye for an eye.
I think one of the common sayings from that genre is “pay those who do right by you back tenfold, pay those who wrong you back a thousandfold”
There’s literally people who interpreted the “shower scene” as him just beating the kid up and them being kicked out of battle school.
I think the most recent movie adaptation takes this route (though it might still be vague enough to be interpreted as the adult trying to keep Ender from knowing he murdered a kid.)
Tying onto that, having to do the “honorable thing” and fight battles symmetrically. Indy shooting the swordsman is peak cinema.
Sun Tzu very specifically says to never fight an even battle unless you have absolutely no other chooice. oooooo
Always fuckin loved that one scene in Escape from LA where Snake is up against three guys and goes, “We’ll shoot when this can hits the ground”
He tosses the can into the air and then just wastes all three guys before it even starts coming down
If your hero can win fighting honorably, the odds aren’t against them enough.
“If we beat the bad guys using their own tactics, we’re no better than them”
The related trope of the hero not killing the villain after the villain has spent a whole story possibly killing, and the hero themselves just probably killed a ton of nameless goons to get to the villain, drives me up a wall
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.
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 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.
My gf loves Bridgerton and so I pretend to like but I would install a guillotine and bring terror to the ton
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.
The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things. Even when there’s intrigue like “oh no, the bad scheming sneaky nobles are doing a heckin scheme against the good and pure and charitable main character friendly nobles, we must make sure the good landed gentry come out on top!” it’s just treated as drama within an inherently legitimate system.
Childish ontologies of good and evil where the good guys are rightful property owners who are nice and good and the villains are disruptive cartoon villains who squabble and betray and do silly cartoon villain things. Further, in that framework the villains are always either barbarous underdogs scheming to take power from the legitimate powerful land owners, or are some sort of fever dream expy of aUtHoRitArIaNiSm that’s either styled as Napoleonic liberal meritocracy as seen by British monarchists or some absurd caricature of the Soviets/China.
The tacit acceptance of monarchism and aristocracy as normal and legitimate things
Something that I thought dealt with this well was The Magicians.
spoiler
After becoming kings and queens of legally-distinct Narnia the protagonists decide “Hey this is real fucking weird” and decide to hold elections, at which point the high king is booted back to Earth because the creature that created legally-distinct Narnia is insane and made it a fundamental law of the universe that the rulers must be from Earth.
restoring the “right” monarchy
Giving nobles magic powers. Especially when people born as commoners get elevated in class due to having magic ability or something. Endorsing the ruling class as being better than everyone else inherently and therefore having a right to rule over them sucks and reinforces meritocratic ideas in the reader.
Possible exception is, when the magic isn’t inherent but the nobles hoard the recources neccessary to perfofm it.
I mean, if there was a group of people who were superhuman, they’d probably become the ruling class. If the wizardgoisie could just conjure food from thin air, what’s the need for a peasantry? If they can create magical automata and golems to do their manual labor, what’s the need for a proletariat? Essentially, an upper class with magic could do atlas shrugged and have it actually work instead of instantly fail because there’s no one there to do labor.
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 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
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.
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.
Pretty sure “robota” is Czech for work/worker, rather than slave. Definitely comes from a Czech play.
Rossum’s Universal Robots.
We literally call them robots, the (Greek? Latin?) word for slave.
Czech, I think.
I just Czeched and you’re right
Killing hundreds of grunts but leaving the big bad alive because the heroes are better than this. Pure propagandistic brain rot that I’m sure most creators don’t even know why they do it.
I’m looking at you, Avatar The Last Airbender
Spend the finale rightfully knocking Fire Nation airships out of the sky, killing everyone onboard, only to let Ozai live.
And that’s after Aang went fishing around for anyone that would tell him it was okay to spare Ozai because literally everyone around him including his past lives were like “No man you really gotta kill this guy”
Yeah this trope needs to die (pun intended) and I see it coming a mile away. This is why I rate akame ga kill lol, despite it’s pretty basic elements.
Aang’s never taken a life except all the times that he did and never felt anything about it.
He’s secretly the last descendant of Eldinglad which is why he is so good at fighting and morally upstanding.
This group of evil human bandits speak with a working class accent.
The main important city is basically just a giant castle. I guess the workers sleep in tents. Who knows, they don’t feature in the story anyway except as brothel wenches.
The amount of SA that just gets shoehorned into SF and Fantasy is ridiculous.
