From: droleary@2015usenet1.subsume.com
For your reference, records indicate that
"Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" wrote:
> No, you're demanding them spend time on things that really, honestly
> don't matter to the kind of story they're telling, and demanding it
> because you have a real-world issue with the kind of story they're telling.
Hardly. My “demand” is that they *actually* tell a good story. I’m
perfectly fine with even *absurd* stories; I love pretty much
everything Douglas Adams wrote. But when the author isn’t just doing
a comedic romp, if they want me to take the universe they created
*seriously*, I have a different set of standards, even for a basic
action movie. I don’t need you to have those same high standards,
but you *should* be intellectually honest as an author that the story
telling is shit when the story telling is clearly shit.
> If they DID make an attempt to explain it and were inconsistent about
> that explanation, that would be doing the former. You're doing the
> latter, saying "I see this real-world problem that I think you should be
> addressing in your movie" rather than "Okay, Giant Monster is a
> postulate for the world, moving on".
Great for you, I guess, if you can so easily suspend your disbelief.
Some of us engage in deeper world building, though. Even if it
doesn’t get written directly into the story or shown on the screen,
the effort will still come through in the final product. And that’s
why we revisit some stories over and over again, and why other
“stories” are just so much filler.
> I get that you think it would be *more interesting* to see someone
> carefully and scientifically explain how a 100-foot-tall ape could
> exist, and eat
No, I don’t think that. So long as the world building had been done
*competently*, it wouldn’t take more than a few pointed asides to
cover it sufficiently. But character development *also* seems to
suffer when crap writers only busy themselves thoughtlessly moving
the “plot” forward.
When Jurassic Park showed the big pile of dino-poo, that was their
nod to the reality of the creatures *and* the reality of the people,
but then they never bothered us with what the *actual* reality of
that would be on the scale of the island’s ecosystem, because that’s
not what the story was about. That’s how it gets done correctly.
It takes so little, yet so few people seem to understand how to do
it or why it is important.
> just like spending
> time explaining where the bathrooms on the Enterprise would be
> pointless; we assume that the humans go to the bathroom SOMEWHERE but
> where and how is irrelevant unless the plot demands we know.
Trek remains a *terrible* example of how to do world building like
that. The series started out purely as a romp, with the technology
getting so little attention that it was essentially magic, and the
characters were essentially archetypes that possibly didn’t even go
to the bathroom (or perhaps their waste was magically transported
out of them :-). Then when they decided late in the game that part
of being a franchise meant they *had* to offer greater insight into
how their universe worked, they did such a terrible job that even
the fans took to calling it Treknobabble.
Contrast that with something like Firefly, which handled it by
simply having a scene that showed Mal finishing up with a toilet.
Didn’t move the plot forward, but didn’t detract from it either,
and served to answer a lot of questions about how their universe
worked. *That* is how you demonstrate you’ve put in the work of
world building. Get the little details right and nobody even
bothers to question the big stuff.
--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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