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∯ Alien Wizard
729
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Sept 14, 2023 6:08:41 GMT
9,897
Ieldra
4,771
August 2016
ieldra
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquisition, KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect Andromeda
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Post by Ieldra on Jan 4, 2019 21:35:04 GMT
On occasion, I thought of writing a long article titled something like "So you want to create your own fictional world..." The occasion was usually some annoyance how authors and screenwriters appeared to mess things up in their worlds because - or so it appeared - they didn't think about it enough. At other occasions, I wondered if this mess someone created could really be intentional, and what it meant about the thought processes of the respective creators.
In any case, I thought since we're all fans of some fictional world or others, and most of us here are also roleplayers, that people might want to discuss worldbuilding independently from any particular work. Questions could be anything related to the topic, but here's a list of some topics....
1. How setting the wrong communications technology can ruin your SF setting. 2. Why it is very hard to create a transhumanist world. 3. Why the presence of religion usually adds to a world's atmosphere, while the presence of gods is more likely to be detrimental. 4. When magic needs to be a system, and when it's better to make it appear closer to miracles (even if it is still technically magic). 5. When technology- or magic-affine creators fail to consider the likely social implications of some technology or magic.
6. When magic-affine creators fail to to consider technological applications of magic. 7. When you can get away with copying or referring to elements of other worlds, and when you can't. 8. When creators fail to think things through.
To get the discussion rolling, I'll start with an example of (1) and possibly (8). It wasn't long into Mass Effect (1) that I was very much put out by the fact that the Normandy could apparently talk to the Citadel at any time. Not only was that inconsistent with the lore (you'd need to be in the same system as a mass relay), it also made the fictional world seem smaller than it really was. It didn't help that there were other elements that contributed to the same impression - such as the incredibly stupid period of 35 years from planet-bound species to regional galactic power. I got the impression that the creators really did want to make their galaxy (even talking of "the galaxy" was incredibly insulting for anyone with a good impression of just how big a galaxy really is) just like present-day Earth, where you can communicate with anyone, anywhere at almost any time, only with a few token human stereotypes added as so-called "alien" species. At the core of SF, for me, there was always the attempt to confront people with the unfamiliar - the immense size of space, the possible alien-ness of non-human life, the strange paths technology could take, and the corresponding reaction by human society to all that, as far as any human creator could achieve that and still entertain. Without that, I thought then, and still think, what the hell is the point of SF? And thus, while Mass Effect had a resonably engaging story and actually did confront us with really strange things - namely the Reapers - it failed to make its world believable in almost everything else. I even called it "bad SF" at times, and since I don't watch much TV I was astonished to hear that its world was considered to be among the better examples of fictional worlds in visual media.
In any case, when making my own worlds for my roleplaying groups, "no FTL communication" is almost always the baseline. It creates distance, it makes places appear more inaccessable and mysterious, and for roleplaying worlds, it's easier to drop player characters in isolated places, so that they must rely on their own resources. It is of course not an absolute rule, but it is one I use whenever there is no pressing need for anything more.
So....any other pet peeves, secret desires, worlds you may want to present?
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Anal Annihilator
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Jun 16, 2019 15:53:28 GMT
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o Ventus
Weeaboobs
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August 2016
oventus
Mass Effect Trilogy, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age Inquistion, KOTOR
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Post by o Ventus on Jan 8, 2019 15:33:25 GMT
These are comics, so retcons and generally fucked continuity is to be expected due to the sheer length of some of these stories and titles, but the way that death works in DC has always kind of bothered me. For the most part, when you die, you’re dead and that’s it. Unless you’re a popular character, then you’re brought back in the next big event and someone else dies and the cycle is repeated. Anyway, my point is that DC started to give death personification. And by that, I mean that over the years DC and Warner bought out other publishers, other IPs, and generally absorbed a bunch of creative works depicting death, and oftentimes these depictions conflict with each other, and other times just flat out make no sense.
Take Nekron from the Blackest Night series. Nekron is the embodiment of death itself in the mainline DCU. He is essentially the grim reaper with a Lantern power ring. My issue with Nekron, as cool as he is in Blackest Night, is his portrayal makes not even a lick of sense. For starters, the Lantern colors in DC represent the emotional spectrum, and Nekron and the Black Lanterns represent death. The problem being that death isn’t an emotion. Granted, neither are half of the other colors, but DCs internal logic states that the colors are th emotional spectrum, so whatever, I can roll with willpower and greed being there despite not really being emotions either. They’re at least tangentially ties to other, actual emotional states. Death... Isn’t. It’s cessation of consciousness. Death is anathema to emotion. Contrast this to the White Lanterns representing life. As I interpreted it in the story, the White Lanterns represent every emotion in th spectrum because any living (sapient) creature naturally feels all manner of emotions.
This is kind of exacerbated by the idea that the dead people wearing the rings, are not actually wearing the rings. It’s actually the opposite, with the rings being the ones with sentience and possessing the corpses of the fallen heroes and villains. The rings are very clearly alive and free thinking (albeit they’re all malicious and gleefully evil), but it seems like they’d be better emotional fits for the Yellow Lantern, fear. Their entire schtick is mentally breaking their victims before killing them and assimilating their corpse into the Corps and using their soul to charge the Black Power Battery. The rings represent death, yet they’re fully alive and both emotionally and physically resonant. I mean, nobody assumes that Geoff Johns writes stories for their logic first. He’s clearly a spectacle writer first and foremost, but come on man.
Anyway, TLDR version is death doesn’t really make sense as a personified entity in DC. This is typically the case regardless of series or franchise, but this is my go-to whenever I think about it.
It really doesn’t help that other characters embody death in DC such as the Black Racer (a guy who rides around on flying skis who represents death for speedsters. No it doesn’t make any more sense in context either), and even Death from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series (of dubious canonicity, admittedly, but Sandman characters have appeared in DC works numerous times). And Sandman Death is supposed to be blanket “death”, no specific types of death or death only for certain groups of people. Eve a character like The Specter could be argued to be an aspect of death, being that he is literally the wrath of God and his entire reason for existing is to destroy evil and exact justice (which in this context just means killing bad guys), embodying the death of villains and evildoers. And speaking of the Specter, he’s actually made into a Black Lantern in Blackest Night. The literal, actual, nigh-omnipotent Wrath of God itself was killed and made into a zombie.
You have a dozen different death gods representing a dozen different ways to die, plus other death gods just being death in general, or being death for specific groups of people, and it just gets really fucking stupid and convoluted.
But like I said, it’s a comic book, so everyone just sort of rolls with it. I still love Blackest Night and it’s one of my favorite recent DC stories (“recent”, it’s I think a decade old now at this point), but holy crap don’t think about it.
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